


What Else Are Friends For?

by rain_sleet_snow



Series: heaven for the climate, but hell for the company [3]
Category: Primeval
Genre: Archaeology, F/M, M/M, One Big Happy Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-19
Updated: 2013-10-19
Packaged: 2018-03-07 08:39:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 38,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3168557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rain_sleet_snow/pseuds/rain_sleet_snow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was a communal camping trip. It was doomed from the word 'go'.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Luka](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Luka/gifts).



> Written for Luka, six months late and at least 20,000 words longer than intended, the prompt being: Stephen, Ryan, Ditzy, Claire et al, ‘What’s that stupid boy done now. If he had a brain, he’d be dangerous’. There are, indeed, multiple stupid boys in this fic. As for Bella, who was kind enough to beta it, I think I owe her (if not my firstborn child) a drink. Since this fic is very large and populated very largely by OCs that mostly aren’t mine, I would like to take this opportunity to note that Blade, Ditzy, Lyle, Kermit and Finn are the property of the forbearing Fred, while Luka herself owns Claire, Cara, Davy, Lizzie and Major Preston: thanks are due to both for their forbearance in the face of my rampages.

            Davy was lying on her bunk trying to sleep when her phone went off. She groaned and reached for it, stared at the caller ID for several confused seconds, and then accepted the call before Claire Bradley could give up on her. Claire would be totally justified in giving up on her for a multitude of reasons, but the fact that she wasn’t prepared to pick up the phone at eleven o’clock at night when she needed to be up at five-thirty was not among them. On the other hand, somebody to talk to who had a brain in their head… a very appealing prospect.

 

            Besides, Claire would track her down sooner or later. Davy had met less reliable heat-seeking missiles.

 

            “Davy here,” she said, closing weary eyes and wiping her forehead with one hand. This mostly just redistributed the sweat, but she felt better for having tried. “Fair warning, Claire, I have been running drills all day in thirty-five degree heat, you could fry an egg on the floor of this barracks, I’m knackered and the cow on the bunk underneath mine is snoring so loud you could hear her from fucking Torquay, so…”

 

            “Let me tell you all about my sixth formers,” Claire said amiably. “My sixth formers and their curious belief that I don’t know they think it’s a badge of honour to have shagged in the second floor stationery cupboard.”

 

             Davy rolled effortfully onto her side, in an attempt to get as much air as possible on as much of her as possible. Unfortunately she was already stripped down to vest and pants, and any less than that would not be acceptable under the circumstances. “Give them to me. I’ll make them wish they’d never been born.” She was mentally sketching out a plan of action before she’d even finished the sentence. Claire’s sixth formers had probably never encountered the concept of running suicides; a basic introduction would be a nice start, followed by fifty push-ups. And none of the crappy girly ones either. What next? Davy wondered, and then dragged herself back to reality.

 

            Claire uttered a sigh that nicely combined wistfulness and wickedness. “Tell you something else instead. You know Dave wants to do a midsummer barbecue?”

 

            “… It’s possible Robbie told me. I know you emailed me. Once upon a time.” Davy sat up and redid her ponytail into a topknot sort of thing that kept her neck entirely bare, and flopped back onto the bunk, turning the thin pillow onto its cooler side as she went. “I think I said I was coming? Why?”

 

            “Dave had a bright idea.”

 

            “Fuck,” Davy moaned into her pillow. Ditzy Owen’s bright ideas were all, in her considered opinion, fucking batshit crazy. And Robbie went along with every single bloody one, and she was a sucker for Robbie’s sweet smile, so she would too. “Like what?”

 

            “He knows somebody who knows somebody who has a field, and we could camp and barbecue in that. Since it’s so hot. I mean, you saw how many people turned up last time, just imagine half of those staying over, and all of it at thirty degrees…” Claire had a very expressive voice. Mostly what it currently expressed was horror akin to the Black Hole of Calcutta.

 

            “Are you sure this is Ditzy’s idea? It sounds too sensible.” Davy flipped onto her front. Every spring in her mattress creaked, and the snoring choked and turned into a snuffle down below. She moderated her voice slightly. The room was approximately the size of a small cupboard, so there were only four of them in it, and because it was hotter than the Tube in the pits of July only the snorer was managing to sleep. One of the remaining two had her iPod headphones in and the other – Donovan, good woman but both dyslexic and shameless – was sexting her girlfriend and occasionally asking for grammatical and spelling advice. She did have a way with words, though. Davy would have to remember some of those phrases for a later occasion.

 

            Still, it would be cruel to wake the only one of them who could sleep in this disaster of a bunkroom.

 

            Claire chortled. “I’ll tell him you said so.”

 

            “Ditzy expects nothing but scorn and disbelief from me.” This wasn’t wholly true - it was Blade who expected nothing other than scorn and disbelief from Davy – but it sounded good. “I have a tent. A two-person tent, no less. Robbie and I can share.”

 

            “Great,” Claire said, with audible relief. “I don’t know about camping myself, but…”

 

            “It’ll be fine, you’ll like it, Cara and me will back you up.” Davy gave up on the pillow entirely. The mattress might be mostly composed of broken springs but it was cooler than the heat-trap polyester of the pillow.

 

            “I’m counting on it. Tents are the boys’ natural habitat, not mine.” Claire gave another sigh, this one philosophical. “If it all goes to pot, you and Cara and Lizzie and I can decamp to Cara’s latest project by way of the nearest off-licence.”

 

            “Latest project?” Davy was in awe of Cara. Cara had a remarkably well-behaved and intelligent baby daughter, a husband wedged firmly under her thumb, held down a part-time job, and somehow also managed to squeeze creative odds and ends in there. When Davy had last checked, Cara was doing wedding photography, carrying Beth with her in a sling. If she was being totally honest, Davy had no bloody idea how Cara managed any of it.

 

            “Grandmother died, left her and Darren her cottage. The grandmother’s, that is. Cara’s turning it into a holiday cottage – the wiring, plumbing, roof and all that are sound, but it could use a bit of sprucing up.” Claire laughed. “We can get drunk and paint things and bitch about the boys while they set fireworks off and burn large chunks of meat.”  


            “Why don’t we skip the tents stage and go straight to drunk painting?” Davy suggested hopefully.

 

            “Because Ditzy is still under the impression he’s in charge.” There was a distant yell of something like ‘I’m home!’ in the background of the call, and Davy heard delight colour Claire’s voice. “Speak of the devil. I’m up here, babe! Oh, Davy, call me back when you get a moment, you’ll never guess what I’ve got to tell you about Niall and Jon –”

 

            There was a clatter on the other end of the line that indicated that Claire had dropped her phone, and Davy winced as she heard other noises that indicated that Ditzy had reached Claire and scooped her up at approximately the same time she’d dropped the phone. Notional sixth formers’ ill-advised antics had nothing on it. Discreetly, Davy ended the call and was surprised and annoyed to get a kick in the back – a fairly powerful one, since in order to make an impression it had to contend with a layer of mostly metallic mattress and the bedframe.

 

            “Oi!” she said, leaning over the side of the bunk and preparing to take issue with Little Miss Snores Like A Pig On Steroids. (Davy had never met her before, and she wasn’t wearing her conveniently name-tagged uniform.)

 

            Little Miss Snores Like A Pig On Steroids mumbled unconvincingly and turned over in her ‘sleep’, which was apparently not as deep as they’d all been led to believe. Although she was evidently also stupider than Davy had been led to believe, since nobody in their right mind would think that somebody fast asleep could – while still fast asleep – forcefully kick four feet up in the air and hit the person on the bunk above by accident.

 

            “I have news for you,” Davy hissed. “Your snoring is twice as loud as my phone call, so you can cut that bullshit right out.” She flopped back onto her bunk and received another kick.

 

            “Don’t bother, Bowie,” Donovan sighed as Davy rocketed upright and prepared to do battle. “Waste of your time and everyone else’s. How do you spell ‘genitalia’?”

 

            “Not sexy,” Davy said definitely, closing her eyes. “I’m not spelling that for you, find another word. Go hard or go home, Donovan.”

 

            Donovan sniggered, and Davy grinned. She opened one eye a crack and reached for her phone again, this time to text Robbie.

 

            _Miss you_ , she typed quickly. _The girl on the bunk underneath me snores worse than you do and isn’t going to make me breakfast_.

 

            _yeah but at least she wont set the kitchen on fire?_ Robbie texted back, gratifyingly rapidly. _i miss u 2. R u coming 2 ldn next wknd?_

 

            _Try keeping me away_ , she wrote back. _I still need to beat you at something to make up for the paintball match disaster._

_darts match, the swan, sat eve._

_Blade’ll win and be a wanker about it._

_just us_ , Robbie clarified _. Neway blade’s busy. go 2 sleep, u kno u’ll b sorry if u dont._

 

             Davy grinned at Robbie’s idiosyncratic text speak, and set her phone down and tried to sleep again. She dreamed of darts boards and bulls’-eyes, and Robbie’s smile.

 

***

 

            “Hello, cutie-pie,” Claire said to the baby on the floor, recovering from having almost trodden on a child that hadn’t been able to crawl when she last checked. “Does your mother know you aren’t where you’re supposed to be?”

 

            Beth Cooper, the most horrifically forward five-month-old Claire had ever met, sat back on her padded bottom and grinned toothlessly up at Claire. “Ba!”

 

            “ _Clever_ girl,” Claire said approvingly. “You are definitely too little to be able to do that, aren’t you, precious? Who’s a precocious little darling, then? You. That’s right, you.”

 

            “Oo!”

 

            Claire rubbed a hand over her mouth, trying to hide her smile, and wondering where Cara was. The front door had not been locked, and Claire, knowing she was expected, had simply walked straight in.

 

            Cara Cooper lurched out of the kitchen, instantly spotted her errant daughter on the floor, and scooped her up. “Beth!”

 

            Beth fussed at having been removed from the floor, and her mother bounced her on her hip and spared a distracted smile for Claire. “Sorry, Claire, I was coming to get the door, but I’ve just got back in with the shopping and then I noticed Beth was gone…”

 

            “Don’t worry.” Claire hugged Cara and kissed her on the cheek, then dropped a kiss on Beth’s downy head. Her fine, fluffy hair was still pale, not yet darkening to Cara’s caramel tint or Darren’s dark brown. “When did she start crawling?”

 

            “Last weekend,” Cara moaned. “She shouldn’t be so good at it, but I suppose she practises when I’m not looking, because every time I turn around she’s _not bloody there_.”

 

            “Taking after Daddy, I see,” Claire remarked.

 

            Cara stopped dead, mouth dropping open, and then giggled hysterically. Beth flailed and kicked to get down; Cara dodged her offspring’s blows with the ease of long practice. “Don’t even joke. Darren encourages her.”  


            “Of course he does, idle little sod. Oops, sorry. Not in front of the baby.” Claire carefully prised Beth out of her mother’s arms and pulled funny faces at her: Beth went silent instead of whining to get down and stared solemnly at Claire, tiny finger in her mouth. “Why don’t I come and help you with the shopping? Or I could hang on to this one for you, for a bit.”  


            “Hang on to her,” Cara said grimly. “She decided she wanted something at Tesco’s and she screamed and _screamed_.”

 

            “Maybe you should sit down for a bit,” Claire suggested. “Make yourself a cup of tea.”

 

            “I can’t, I…”

 

            “…am going slowly mad?” Claire supplied, stroking Beth’s head. Beth rested it against her shoulder, and patted Claire’s chest with one tiny, spit-sticky starfish hand before sticking its thumb back into her mouth and closing her eyes. Claire was equal parts touched and revolted. “Davy thinks you’re superwoman, you know.”

 

            Cara snorted, and wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “Davy’s wrong. But very handy around the house.”  


            “You said she visited you.” Claire nudged a kitchen chair out from the table with one foot and sat down in it.

 

            Cara wandered restlessly around the kitchen for a moment, delicate artist’s hands sliding over counters and cupboards before she put the kettle on. “Two weeks ago, before going on a training exercise. I pointed her at some IKEA stuff I wanted assembling, and half an hour later, it was done. And then she bought me dinner and told me funny stories about Finn.”

 

            Claire grinned. “Told you she’d shape up.”

 

            Cara smiled and fetched down two mugs. “I honestly didn’t think a bright girl like her would stick with Finn very long. Five months is a record, isn’t it?”

 

            Claire cast her mind back with some effort. All she’d really known of Rob Finn’s previous girlfriends were a few casual snippets dropped by Dave, and that one nurse, Amelia, who had been sane and lovely and had therefore only dated Finn for about two months. Happily, Davy was lovely, but not sane. “I think so. Are you okay, Cara?”

 

            “Yeah,” Cara said without hesitating. “Just tired. We’ve spent the last week stocktaking at work, which is just a great time to come back from maternity leave I _don’t_ think, and Beth doesn’t sleep through the night, and she was sick a couple of days ago, sick and miserable – oh, lord. She seems fine, but I shouldn’t have handed her off to you.”

 

            “Firstly, you didn’t hand her off to me, I took her. Secondly, I’m a teacher, if it’s going round the local kids I’ll get it anyway.” Claire cuddled Beth, who was uncharacteristically quiet and pliable, and accepted the cup of tea Cara pushed in her direction. “When did you last see Darren?”

 

            “A week ago, he came down for the weekend.” Cara’s mouth quirked, and her grey eyes brightened. “He was so pleased – Beth crawled for the first time in front of him.”

 

            “Little rugrat has a wonderful sense of timing,” Claire remarked, taking Cara’s point. She could imagine Darren’s broad happy grin at not missing just this one milestone.

 

            Cara smiled and sniffled; she pulled a tissue from her cardigan sleeve and blew her nose. “She certainly does.” She laughed. “I made Darren put up the baby gate. I said if she could do it once, she would do it again. He didn’t believe me. Said she was too little to be crawling properly, she probably wouldn’t do it again for ages.”

 

            “Not superwoman,” Claire said, grinning. “Just clairvoyant. Did he put it up?”

 

            “Yes, on pain of sleeping on the sofa.” Cara caught Claire’s eye, and they both laughed aloud. “He said he’ll come back down as soon as he can,” Cara added absently, and pulled the tie out of her long, slightly tangled hair and started to tidy and re-plait it.

 

            Claire watched for a while, and then glanced down at Beth, who still had her eyes closed and was breathing slowly and deeply. “I think Beth’s gone to sleep.”

 

            “No! You’re kidding me.” Cara leaned forward and peered at Beth, and then sat back. “She has, too. Oh, great, we can talk without having to try not to swear in front of her.”

 

            Claire grinned. Cara never said anything stronger than ‘bloody’ or ‘damn’. Claire treasured the memory of Cara’s expression when Davy had cut her finger badly chopping vegetables and had come out with a fluently-expressed string of words that explained where the phrase ‘swearing like a sailor’ had come from. Claire had laughed, Lizzie had merely raised one amused eyebrow, but Cara’s jaw had just about hit the floor. Possibly Darren didn’t swear in front of her, or maybe he just wasn’t a fluent curser under ordinary conditions; perhaps Cara just hadn’t expected it from Davy. Claire refrained from saying any of this, and handed Beth over to her mother. Beth stirred, and they both froze, but she didn’t wake. Cara carried her upstairs, and Claire sat in silence for a moment before getting up and starting to attend to the remainder of the shopping. All the perishables had been put away, so Claire had to guess at where everything else went. She had managed to put away cereal and wash a bunch of apples to put in the upside-down fruit bowl on the draining rack when Cara came back downstairs with a baby monitor and no Beth.

 

            “Where do you keep the sugar?” Claire asked.

 

            “Top cupboard above the kettle,” Cara said. “Claire, this is very kind, but you needn’t –”

 

            “I know, I know,” Claire said. “You can manage. You can do it all yourself. You are, despite all your snorting when everyone says it, superwoman.” She threw a smile at Cara. “Sit down and tell me where things go.”

 

            “Ugh,” Cara said, collapsing into a chair. “Fine. Pasta in the cupboard next to the sugar, with the cereal.”

 

            Claire obediently moved the pasta to the place Cara had told her to. “Davy’s okay with the change of plan, by the way – for the barbecue.”

 

            “What? Oh. Oh, good.” Cara rubbed her hands over her eyes and absently drank half of Claire’s tea. “She’s probably a hundred times more used to tents than any of the rest of us. Have you spoken to her lately?”

 

            “Yes,” Claire said. “Baked beans?”

 

            “Lower cupboard, by the oven. How is she?”

 

            “Knackered. Hating the heat. Feeling like taking her temper out on innocent passers-by.” Claire found the correct cupboard on the second go and slotted a four-pack of baked beans into it. “Can you remember when she’s off exercise?”

 

            “Next weekend. When she came to see me she said it was only three weeks.” Cara glanced out of the window; the sun was shining almost brightly enough to hurt people’s eyes, and the hosepipe ban in effect was making Cara’s somewhat overgrown plants wilt. “Does anyone know when this is going to break?”

 

            “Approximately never. Global warming, baby.” Claire put the rest of the tins – alphabet soup and minestrone – away and returned to her seat at the table. She brought Cara’s tea with her. “Tell me what you got out of Darren about Blade again? I still can’t believe it.”

 

            Cara’s eyes brightened and she straightened up. “I couldn’t either. I made Darren tell me twice. I don’t think _he_ can believe it - I’m still not totally sure it’s true. We could get Davy to check with Finn, Darren says he got his information from Finn, and Finn does share a house with him –”

 

            “Or we could just corner him at the barbecue…”

 

            They paused to consider this, then caught each other’s eye, shuddered and shook their heads a decisive ‘no’. Blade was a scary guy. Claire was willing to concede that he was all right around people he knew very well and trusted, but even though he was a good friend of Dave’s she’d barely spoken to him. He gave very little about himself away, and he frightened most people. The only exception to this rule that Claire knew of was small children, who were notoriously afraid of nothing, and whose judgement – after years as a teacher – Claire was inclined to discount. She didn’t teach below year 9, but her thirteen-year-old students were trying enough. Children’s judgement aside, though, she’d laughed along with everyone else when Don and Laura Tait’s six-year-old had swarmed up a picnic table onto Blade’s shoulders and insisted on a ride. The astonished look that had crossed Blade’s face had been almost human and definitely worthy of a Turner Prize, and nobody had helped him prise Milly off his head because they were all too busy having hysterics. To his credit, he’d been remarkably gentle about it.

 

            Still, Claire didn’t propose to confront Blade about alleged developments in his romantic life, and she didn’t think Cara meant to either. She dragged her mind back to the point and spoke again to Cara, who was daydreaming and tracing patterns on the plastic-coated fabric of the tablecloth.

 

            “Tell me again what Darren said? Blade’s seriously dating someone?”

 

            “I don’t know about _seriously_ ,” Cara demurred, running one hand up the nape of her slender neck into the base of her loose plait. “The first thing Darren said was that Blade had been out with someone once or twice, and everyone had been teasing him about it.”

 

            “They’re crazy,” Claire muttered, and shook her head again.

 

            “We knew that,” Cara pointed out, and took a gulp of tea, then stopped with the mug still at her lips and stared at Claire’s mug. “Oh God. I stole your tea. Sorry?”

 

            “It’s exactly the same as yours,” Claire said. “What did Darren say then?”

 

            “Well, I asked him about it, and – I don’t think he wanted to tell me, and he said maybe I shouldn’t tell you.” Cara rolled her eyes.

 

            “Did he make you promise? The cheek!”

 

            “No,” Cara said scornfully. “He’s brighter than that. What he told me was that the woman’s shy –”

 

            “What the hell is she doing dating Blade, then?” Claire made herself a second cup of tea.

 

            “I don’t know. But Darren seems to think we might be a bit… well, no, that’s not right. _Darren_ says that _Blade_ doesn’t want too much attention drawn yet, because he doesn’t know if it’s a thing, they’re very new and she’s… reserved.”

 

            “And it’s not like Blade responds well to personal queries,” Claire mused, dumping another spoonful of sugar into her tea and stirring it.

 

            “He implied that we might be a bit overwhelming, then tried to go back on it.”

 

            “He bloody well should! Well, if she’s a delicate flower, we’ll never meet her. She won’t last long enough.”

 

            Cara sniggered and poured another cup of tea for herself. “True. But Darren said Blade’s had a thing for her for a bit, and they’ve been out on – so far as he knows – three dates. But Finn might not know about all of them, apparently. Darren’s money is on Blade being sneaky about dating this woman, and he knows for sure they’ve been dating a month and thinks it could actually be up to two months.” 

 

            Claire whistled. “Did he give you a name?”

 

            “No. He seemed concerned I might Facebook-stalk her, or something.” Cara shrugged and flicked her plait over her shoulder, and her eyes glinted, making her look like a cross between Machiavelli and a fresh-faced school kid. “I didn’t think it was worth threatening him with being kicked out of bed over.”

 

            Claire took one look at Cara’s sweet Mona Lisa smile and snorted. “Don’t even try, Cara. I know you, and there’s no way that’s what you did to get the information out of him. Do you know how thin the walls of my spare room are, and does ‘last October’ mean anything to you?”

 

            Cara giggled. “Oops. Sorry.”

 

            “You’d better be. Dave was commentating throughout. I didn’t sleep a wink.”

 

            “Gross!” Cara cried, but she looked neither revolted nor remorseful. “I did persuade Darren to tell me where she met Blade, though.” She paused. “You’ll never guess.”

 

            “Where?” Claire asked obediently, imbuing her tone with the expected breathless interest.

 

            “At work,” Cara said, and her eyes were level and keen. “He told me she’s a civilian and she’s working as a PA, and then he clammed up.”

 

            “ _Oh_ ,” Claire breathed, the laugh that she’d expected to let out falling off her face and being replaced with calculation. “Wouldn’t he tell you anything else?”

 

            “No, and then the baby monitor went off and we both got distracted.” Cara rearranged herself on her seat. “But – this is weird, isn’t it? Not just that they’d be posted to the UK for so long, on an assignment that’s clearly UK-based. But somewhere where Blade could come into contact with a civilian at his workplace long enough to get to like her and get her to trust him enough to say yes when he asks her out…”

 

            “That is weird,” Claire murmured, speculating wildly.

           

            There was a long silence.

 

            “It’s not as if we’re ever going to know,” Cara said practically, draining her second cup of tea.

 

            “True,” Claire conceded, sipping at her own cup. She’d over-sugared it. “Knowing the boys, it’ll be something ridiculous. Like scouring the country for aliens.”

 

            Cara inhaled her tea. “You’ve been at the Doctor Who. Anyway, you said you had something to tell me, too.” Her eyes widened. “Oh my God, Claire, you’re not-”

 

            “ _No_! I am not fucking pregnant!” Claire shoved her hands into her wild blonde curls. “For God’s sake, Cara. That was one time.”

 

            Cara shrugged unrepentantly. “What is it, then?”

 

            “Gossip,” Claire said, folding her arms and glaring. “Gossip I’m not sure I want to tell you now.”

 

            “Oh, come on,” Cara said, not remotely impressed. “I can keep my mouth shut. There’s nobody else here, is there? That’s the only reason I thought maybe -”

 

            “No,” Claire repeated, and yanked her clip out of her hair. “Ugh, I need a haircut. No, I went back to my doctor and had words on the subject. I’ve gone back to the shots, it’s more of a pain in the arse but it’s more reliable, and everything is _totally fine_ , and we are never, ever bringing that up again.”

 

            Cara’s mouth twisted. “Why? Are you ashamed?”

 

            “No! I just feel so bloody stupid.” Claire’s over-long curls fell into her face, and she forked them out with her fingers. “Unplanned pregnancies are things that happen to my poor impressionable year 11s who haven’t got their lives together, not sensible teachers.” Claire’s brain caught up with her mouth. “Um – sorry. I didn’t mean -”

 

            Cara, whose undergraduate-level photography course had been terminally interrupted first by her mother’s illness and then by Beth’s advent, brushed her apologies aside. “You dealt with it. We can forget about it, if you like.”

 

            “I do like,” Claire said more harshly than she meant to, and composed herself. “Anyway. It’s not about me, it’s about Jon.”

 

            Cara spilt the glass of juice she was pouring all over the counter. “Really? Jon?”

 

            “Can I have a glass? Yes, really.”

 

            Cara poured a second glass and mopped up the apple-flavoured puddle before it could drip onto the floor. She brought them back to the table and sat down. “What, his mother’s started a vendetta against Rupert Murdoch and enlisted Jon as muscle?”

 

            “Don’t even joke,” Claire said feelingly. She had met Julia Denton once: the older woman had been defiantly chain-smoking in a hospital, her only concession to the locale the fact that she was smoking out of a window, and waiting for Jon to come round. Claire would back Julia Denton in a straight fight against half the planet. “No, apparently Jon’s found someone too. Lizzie saw him at a big fancy dinner in London about a month ago and backed him into a corner to interrogate him, you know how she does, and apparently she couldn’t get a straight answer out of him but she did get a lot of very suspicious evasions.”

 

            “That doesn’t mean much, though,” Cara said thoughtfully, sitting back and taking her lower lip between her teeth, eyes narrowing.

 

            “Lizzie said she’d put money on three things: firstly, it’s a civilian, secondly, it’s a civilian he’s not really supposed to be shagging, and thirdly, it’s a man.”

 

            Cara choked on her apple juice and coughed.

 

            “What is it, Lizzie’s gift for squeezing information out of people or the gay thing?”

 

            “Bit of both,” Cara got out. “I thought Jon was straight.”

 

            Claire shrugged elaborately. “Maybe it’s somebody at work. Going on what you said Darren said about Blade…”

 

            “Maybe.” Cara’s eyes went round. “Of course! Stephen!”

 

            “What!” Claire shrieked, and then clapped a hand over her mouth. They both listened in perfect stillness, but the white noise from the baby monitor turned into a grand total of nothing. “Shit. Sorry, Cara.”  


            “It’s okay, she didn’t wake up,” Cara said quietly. “And no, I didn’t mean Jon and Stephen could be shagging, don’t be stupid.”

 

            Claire winced, and tried to visualise Stephen leaving Ryan’s side for anything short of Armageddon and Ryan’s direct order. The mental image failed to appear, probably because it would never, ever happen in a million years. “No, sorry, that _was_ stupid.”

 

            “We know Stephen works with them. And we know they’re all constantly gossiping. So Stephen _must_ know who these people are.” Cara tapped her short nails on the side of her glass. “We could definitely get that out of Stephen at the barbecue if he won’t cough it up over email. Is he coming?”

 

            “Work allowing, yes,” Claire confirmed, rubbing her chin. “That’s definitely an idea.”

 

            “Speaking of the barbecue,” Cara continued, “and on a totally different topic, has Dave found another eight ways to make it more complicated, or are we now on the final plan?”

 

            “I can’t tell,” Claire sighed. “He’s just sort of… run with it. I’m thinking that I should wait for him to settle on something so totally crazed even he can see it’s a bad idea and then trim it down to normal size while he’s docile enough.”

 

            Cara snorted. “And how long d’you think that’ll take?”

 

            “On current showing? At least a month.” Claire rubbed her temples. “Just so long as he doesn’t get any more smart ideas. That’s all I ask.”

 

            The baby monitor squawked.


	2. Chapter 2

From: Dave [coldhands@gmail.com]

To: Claire [claire_bradley@hotmail.com], Rob [robdiarmudfinn@hotmail.com], Davy [allatsea@talktalk.net], Darren [kermitthefrog24@aol.com], Cara [c.cooper.photography@gmail.com], Jon [J_Lyle@hotmail.com], Stephen [harts1@cmu.ac.uk], Tom [tryan3@btinternet.com], Don + Laura [taitfamily@talktalk.net], Mrs Preston [preston_mathers@gmail.com], Niall [niall_b_richards@hotmail.com]

Subject: MIDSUMMER

 

Hi everyone

 

So is everyone ok for the 22nd-23rd of June? Guessing not everyone will want to stay the whole weekend so the barbecue’s on the evening of the 22nd and anyone who wants to stay over should bring a tent. If anyone’s got a spare one going that would be great. Stephen and Tom have said they’ll bring fireworks. Also there’s an aerial walk just down the road – looks like kids’ play but might be fun, and who knows, some of the WAGs might be up for it? (Davy?)

 

LAST CALL FOR PLUS-ONES. THAT MEANS YOU, BLADE & JON.

 

Dave

 

***

 

From: niall_b_richards [niall_b_richards@hotmail.com]

To: Ditz [coldhands@gmail.com]

Subject: Re: MIDSUMMER

 

Cut it the fuck out, Ditz.

 

***

 

From: Jon Lyle [J_Lyle@hotmail.com]

To: Ditzy Owen [coldhands@gmail.com]

Subject: Re: MIDSUMMER

 

I told you, I don’t have the sort of relationships where you bring along a plus one. Enough. You’ve made your point and you don’t need to make it again in front of the Major’s wife, for fuck’s sake. I don’t need another grilling from her.

 

***

               

From: Claire Bradley [claire_bradley@hotmail.com]

To: Dave [coldhands@gmail.com]

Subject: Re: MIDSUMMER

 

Babe, we are going to have a talk about overcomplicating things and putting people on the spot in front of their friends and colleagues when I get home, and not a sexy kind of talk, either.

  

Also, Davy’s going to kill you, and I will stand by and hold her jacket. You know she hates being called a WAG and you know why she hates being called a WAG. She puts up with enough shit about that from her male colleagues and I will not have you making a circle of acquaintances that is SUPPOSED TO BE FUN AND SUPPORTIVE, DAVE into something that involves running the gauntlet of irritating people. If I have to throw you out of the house every time she comes round I’ll have a sense of humour failure.

 

***

 

From: The Taits [taitfamily@talktalk.net]

To: Dave O [ coldhands@gmail.com]

CC: Claire B [claire_bradley@hotmail.com], Rob F [robdiarmudfinn@hotmail.com], Rob F’s Girlfriend [allatsea@talktalk.net], Kermit C [kermitthefrog24@aol.com], Cara C [c.cooper.photography@gmail.com], Lyle [J_Lyle@hotmail.com], Ryan’s Fiance [harts1@cmu.ac.uk], Ryan [tryan3@btinternet.com], Mrs Preston [preston_mathers@gmail.com], Blade [niall_b_richards@hotmail.com]

Subject: Re: MIDSUMMER

 

Unfortunately I think we have Dons parents staying with us that weekend… hope you all have a great time!!

 

xx Laura          

 

***

 

From: Dr. S. Hart [s.hart@arc.gov.uk]

To: Cpt. T. Ryan [t.ryan@arc.gov.uk]

Subject: Fireworks?

 

When did we agree to bring fireworks to the barbecue? Also, is Ditzy pissed off at Blade and Lyle?

 

Dr. Stephen Hart

Associate Researcher, Department of Palaeontology

Anomaly Research Centre

[s.hart@arc.gov.uk](mailto:s.hart@arc.gov.uk)

 

***

 

From: Cpt. T. Ryan [t.ryan@arc.gov.uk]

To: Dr. S. Hart [s.hart@arc.gov.uk]

Subject: Re: Fireworks?

 

Never and sort of. Lyle is simultaneously being emotionally constipated and having a sexual identity crisis. Blade is terrified Miss Wickes is going to decide she doesn’t like him after all and is therefore behaving like she’s red-hot metal – handle with extreme care. It’s all sodding boring to listen to/watch.

 

I’ll fix Ditzy.

 

Captain T. Ryan

Head of Security

Anomaly Research Centre

[t.ryan@arc.gov.uk](mailto:t.ryan@arc.gov.uk)

 

***

 

From: Dr. S. Hart [s.hart@arc.gov.uk]

To: Cpt. T. Ryan [t.ryan@arc.gov.uk]

Subject: Re: Re: Fireworks

 

It’s not that I’m against fireworks, in principle or in practice.

 

You mean you’ll call Claire.

 

Dr. Stephen Hart

Associate Researcher, Department of Palaeontology

Anomaly Research Centre

[s.hart@arc.gov.uk](mailto:s.hart@arc.gov.uk)

 

***

 

From: Cpt. T. Ryan [t.ryan@arc.gov.uk]

To: Dr. S. Hart [s.hart@arc.gov.uk]

Subject: Re: Re: Re: Fireworks

 

 

Captain T. Ryan

Head of Security

Anomaly Research Centre

[t.ryan@arc.gov.uk](mailto:t.ryan@arc.gov.uk)

 

***

 

From: Graham and Lizzie [preston_mathers@gmail.com]

To: David Owen [coldhands@gmail.com]

CC: Claire Bradley [claire_bradley@hotmail.com], Robert Finn [robdiarmudfinn@hotmail.com], Davina Bowie [allatsea@talktalk.net], Darren Cooper [kermitthefrog24@aol.com], Cara Cooper [c.cooper.photography@gmail.com], Jonathan Lyle [J_Lyle@hotmail.com], Stephen Hart [harts1@cmu.ac.uk], Thomas Ryan [tryan3@btinternet.com], Niall Richards [niall_b_richards@hotmail.com]

Subject: Re: MIDSUMMER

 

David,

 

Graham and I will certainly be there for the evening but we won’t be staying over, since my niece Cecy is riding in a horse trials on the 23rd, and we promised to attend. Good luck with the organisation! Could you let us have a map or directions to the location, perhaps a little closer to the time?

 

Best wishes,

 

Lizzie

 

***

 

From: Rob Finn [robdiarmudfinn@hotmail.com]

To: Ditz [coldhands@gmail.com]

Re: MIDSUMMER

 

Mate don’t even with the WAG thing. She hates it. Some wankers on board ship mock her about it and she daydreams about drowning them.

 

Just so you know not sure I can stop her drowning you if you say it to her face okay.

 

***

 

From: Cara Cooper [c.cooper.photography@gmail.com]

To: Dave Owen [coldhands@gmail.com]

CC: Claire Bradley [claire_bradley@hotmail.com], Rob Finn [robdiarmudfinn@hotmail.com], Davy Bowie, [allatsea@talktalk.net], Darren [kermitthefrog24@aol.com], Jon Lyle [J_Lyle@hotmail.com], Stephen Hart [harts1@cmu.ac.uk], Tom Ryan [tryan3@btinternet.com], Lizzie Preston [preston_mathers@gmail.com], Blade Richards [niall_b_richards@hotmail.com]

Subject: Re: MIDSUMMER

 

Just to say Darren and I can make it! Darren’s sister confirmed she’s okay to take Beth for the entire weekend.

 

Cara

 

\----

 

Cara Cooper

Photographer

[c.cooper.photography@gmail.com](mailto:c.cooper.photography@gmail.com)

0712 763 3677

 

***

 

From: Dave [coldhands@gmail.com]

To: Claire [claire_bradley@hotmail.com], Rob [robdiarmudfinn@hotmail.com], Davy [allatsea@talktalk.net], Darren [kermitthefrog24@aol.com], Cara [c.cooper.photography@gmail.com], Jon [J_Lyle@hotmail.com], Stephen [harts1@cmu.ac.uk], Tom [tryan3@btinternet.com], Mrs Preston [preston_mathers@gmail.com], Niall [niall_b_richards@hotmail.com]

Subject: Re: Re: MIDSUMMER

 

Hi everyone

 

So that’s everyone but Don & Laura confirmed for the 22nd, and everyone but Don, Laura and Major & Mrs Preston confirmed for the 23rd. Except for Davy. Does anyone know when Davy’s back in contact? Surely the Navy has internet on ships? They spend enough money on them.

 

If people could let me know whether they’re up for the aerial walk and if they would also like to bring fireworks along, that would be very helpful. And dietary requirements please – I really don’t want to have to take anyone to A&E (again) (that means you Finn).

 

Dave

 

***

 

            Ditzy sat in the infirmary office, filling out paperwork with joyless efficiency, and grabbed his phone and put it to his ear by instinct when it buzzed in his pocket. “Ditzy speaking.”

 

            “It’s me,” Claire said. “Can you talk?”

 

            Ditzy glanced automatically at his phone. Half-nine. She must have been out with the girls. “Night shift but nothing’s happening. I’m doing paperwork and watching over a concussion case. Yeah, I’m okay to talk. Is this the ‘you’ve been a twat, Dave’ lecture?”

 

            “It is indeed.” Claire sighed. “Look, I’m sure you already know that was a bad move…”

 

            “Lyle cornered me to tell me so at length, Blade is giving me the silent treatment, and Davy hasn’t yet turned up to castrate me with boltcutters so I can only assume she’s saving the best for later.” Ditzy pinched the bridge of his nose and leant back in his computer chair, which squeaked. “Finn, however, has let me know the background on not liking the WAG thing. She works with some shitheads.”

 

            “She does.” Something pinged in the background of Claire’s call; probably a microwave. “Just… every now and then everyone screws up. It’s fine, you know? But…”

 

            “Yeah?...”

 

            “Don’t get carried away in a fit of organisation, all right? You’re not actually king of the world, just the barbecue.”

 

            “And your heart.”

 

            Claire sighed heavily, but her next words came with a smile. “And my heart, you git.”

 

***

           

            Davy dragged herself up the final flight of stairs to her flat, disposed of the students hanging around the corridor like a blight of gnats with a few well-chosen words and accidental swipes of her rucksack, and nearly collapsed in her hallway. She recovered enough to lock the front door behind her and set the bathtub running before going around opening windows and checking the contents of the fridge. Only a couple of things were off: she binned them and put a can of beer in the fridge before stripping and dumping her clothes in front of the washing machine and going to climb straight into the bathtub. A good, thorough scrub got most of the cobwebs out, and the hot water felt like too much in the flat’s stuffy air but still did something for her screaming muscles; following it up with a cold shower left her feeling much perkier and capable of coping with a takeaway menu.

 

            She climbed out of the tub without falling over, wrapped herself in a towel that scratched and needed replacing, and dressed in a haphazard but extremely comfortable collection of clothes she found in the bottom drawer of her bedroom. The towel got wrapped around her dripping hair, and Davy Bowie ensconced herself in her kitchen with a collection of takeaway menus, her laptop, and a cold beer. She was completely shattered, and badly needed to sleep for a week; life being what it was, she’d have to make do with sleeping for eight hours, getting on a train to London and sleeping all the way there, and hoping Robbie met her at the station, otherwise she might fall asleep on the Tube and wind up God alone knew where. On the other hand, she’d have Robbie keeping her company for a whole weekend, and that easily outweighed the prospect of sleeping for a week in Davy’s book.

 

            Davy gave herself half a second for a silly grin, and then applied herself to the serious business of buying a takeaway. She went for most of a Peking duck with a few sides, phoned it in, and settled in to wait forty-five minutes. There was nothing interesting on TV or iPlayer, so she went for her email address, wondering if there’d be an email from either of her older siblings in lieu of a phone call or, hell, a visit. Maybe Cara would have sent her some of her photographic work to look at again, or –

 

            _67 Emails_ , read the email page. When she’d left, there had been three. Davy was tidy-minded like that.

 

            “What the fuck,” Davy said weakly, and clicked on the link in the hope that they were all misbegotten Facebook notifications.

 

            “What the _fuck_ ,” Davy repeated once the page had loaded, and as a precautionary measure, she went and put another beer in the fridge.

 

***

 

From: Davy Bowie [allatsea@talktalk.net]

To: Claire Bradley [claire_bradley@gmail.com]

CC: Cara [c.cooper.photography@gmail.com], Stephen [harts1@cmu.ac.uk], Mrs Preston [preston_mathers@gmail.com]

Subject: Claire, explain your boyfriend

 

I got back half an hour ago and my inbox is full of crap about MIDSUMMER and a massive argument about aerial walkways and about forty emails from you lot, and none of it makes a bloody bit of sense. Can someone enlighten me, for the love of God?

 

Also, I’m going to Hammersmith tomorrow, if shit’s going down in that house I want advance warning.

 

***

 

 From: Lizzie & Graham Preston [preston_mathers@gmail.com]

To: Davina Bowie [allatsea@talktalk.net]

CC: Cara Cooper [c.cooper.photography@gmail.com], Stephen Hart [harts1@cmu.ac.uk], Claire Bradley [claire_bradley@gmail.com]

Subject: Re: Claire, explain your boyfriend

 

Dear Davy,

 

So glad to hear you’re back, and, I trust, in one piece. The story behind the emails is that David Owen is trying to organise a barbecue on Midsummer, and, as usual, it’s all got rather out of hand. Claire has told me that you were apprised of the barbecue being stretched out over two days, as opposed to one, with the official barbecue taking place on the evening of the 22nd. Most people are staying over in tents. The part that you may have missed is that there will be fireworks and there is a proposed trip to a nearby aerial obstacle course. Opinion is somewhat divided as to whether any of this is a good idea, but Claire informs me that over her dead body will she attempt any obstacle course of any sort in David’s company and I believe Cara feels similarly.

 

I also understand that Niall Richards may or may not have acquired a girlfriend, but since none of us has officially heard about it, I suggest that you not mention it when you visit Hammersmith tomorrow. I hope you have a lovely time!

 

Lizzie

 

***

 

From: Dr. S. Hart [harts1@cmu.ac.uk]

To: Davina Bowie [allatsea@talktalk.net]

CC: Cara C [c.cooper.photography@gmail.com], Mrs preston [preston_mathers@gmail.com], Claire [claire_bradley@gmail.com]

Subject: Re: Re: Claire, explain your boyfriend

 

That’s about the size of it. I was thinking you and I might be interested in the aerial obstacle course but nobody else. Unless we go separately from the lads? It looks like fun.

 

Blade’s OK right now, actually.

 

***

 

From: Cara Cooper Photography [c.cooper.photography@gmail.com]

To: Stephen [harts1@cmu.ac.uk]

CC: Davy [allatsea@talktalk.net], Claire [claire_bradley@gmail.com], Lizzie Preston [preston_mathers@gmail.com] 

Subject: Re: Re: Re: Claire, explain your boyfriend

 

I don’t like heights!

 

Also how can you tell?

 

\----

 

Cara Cooper

Photographer

[c.cooper.photography@gmail.com](mailto:c.cooper.photography@gmail.com)

0712 763 3677

 

***

 

From: Dr. S. Hart [harts1@cmu.ac.uk]

To: Cara C [c.cooper.photography@gmail.com]

CC: Davina Bowie [allatsea@talktalk.net], Mrs preston [preston_mathers@gmail.com], Claire [claire_bradley@gmail.com]

Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Claire, explain your boyfriend

 

More than three expressions in the last week and none of them suggested he was about to commit murder? There was an actual smile yesterday.

 

***

 

From: Davy Bowie [allatsea@talktalk.net]

To: Claire Bradley [claire_bradley@gmail.com]

CC: Cara [c.cooper.photography@gmail.com], Stephen [harts1@cmu.ac.uk], Mrs Preston [preston_mathers@gmail.com]

Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Claire, explain your boyfriend

 

Okay, thanks for the intel everyone. I think I more or less know what’s going on now. And for the record, the aerial obstacle course sounds right up my street and I’ll go with whoever’s interested. Is there any interest in a girls’ (and Stephen) trip? Or would it just be me and Stephen?

 

P.S. can I take it as read you all want me to find out if Blade does have a girlfriend? Is Stephen not talking?

 

***

 

From: Lizzie & Graham Preston [preston_mathers@gmail.com]

To: Davy Bowie [allatsea@talktalk.net]

CC: Cara [c.cooper.photography@gmail.com], Stephen [harts1@cmu.ac.uk], Claire Bradley [claire_bradley@gmail.com]

Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Claire, explain your boyfriend

 

Far be it from me to try to stop you, dear. Do let me know if you find out anything.

 

***

 

From: Dr. S. Hart [harts1@cmu.ac.uk]

To: Davina Bowie [allatsea@talktalk.net]

CC: Cara C [c.cooper.photography@gmail.com], Mrs preston [preston_mathers@gmail.com], Claire [claire_bradley@gmail.com]

Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Claire, explain your boyfriend

 

It’s not that I’m not talking. I don’t know anything to talk about. Tom does, but he’s saying nothing out of some kind of respect for, I don’t know, Blade’s privacy.

 

***

 

From: Cara Cooper Photography [c.cooper.photography@gmail.com]

To: Stephen [harts1@cmu.ac.uk]

CC: Davy [allatsea@talktalk.net], Claire [claire_bradley@gmail.com], Lizzie Preston [preston_mathers@gmail.com] 

Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Claire, explain your boyfriend

 

Privacy? Around here?

 

Just don’t get stabbed, Davy.

 

\----

 

Cara Cooper

Photographer

[c.cooper.photography@gmail.com](mailto:c.cooper.photography@gmail.com)

0712 763 3677

 

***

 

From: Claire [claire_bradley@gmail.com]

To: Davy [allatsea@talktalk.net]

CC: Stephen [harts1@cmu.ac.uk], Cara Cooper [c.cooper.photography@gmail.com], Lizzie Preston [preston_mathers@gmail.com]   

Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Claire, explain your boyfriend

 

Chiming in late to say

a) Dave defies explanation, I’ve tried,

b) Lizzie’s got all the key details down,

c) any information you have about Blade’s latest squeeze will be gratefully received and rewarded with as many Bloody Marys as you can get down you,

d) and I’m really glad you’re coming along and you don’t have a spare tent, do you?


	3. Chapter 3

            Finn could be a reasonably sensible man, provided you gave him advance warning and a decent run-up. Davy’s first, second and third texts chronicling her journey therefore allowed him to be present when her train got in to Paddington station, standing in front of the correct platform, and holding a cup of coffee made just the way she liked it from Starbucks and something chocolate-related, also from Starbucks. The lid of the coffee cup was very carefully jammed on and Finn had taken great care not to squash the cookie he had settled on as the most chocolate-filled option, but he still got scalding hot coffee on his hand and crushed the cookie when Davy hurdled the ticket barrier in one smooth stride and literally threw herself at him.

 

            Finn supposed it had been two months, after all, and then he stopped thinking entirely because Davy was kissing him. He grinned foolishly at her and passed her the coffee and cookie, which were received with a cry of caffeine-deprived delight and another enthusiastic kiss, this one interrupted by a member of the station staff whose suspicions had been aroused by a passenger leaping the ticket barrier in a single bound. Davy, whose common sense was temporarily in abeyance, merely stuffed her valid ticket into the staff member’s hand and threw her arms around Finn’s neck, thereby ensuring that her own hands got scalded as well as Finn’s.

 

            Wisely, the member of station staff went away shaking his head, with only a few monitory words on the consequences for damaging station property. Davy and Finn totally ignored him anyway, already halfway to the Tube and stuffing their faces with shared coffee and the cookie, which was not entirely crumbs after all. Finn just listened for a bit while Davy talked, three weeks of pent-up frustration and three hours of train ride spilling out of her head while he watched her quick hands gesticulate, her dark hair escape her ponytail and her blue eyes flashing, counted every freckle on the bridge of her nose, catalogued the new ones on her cheekbones. He grinned when she made things sound funny and pulled mocking faces when she teased him, and didn’t let on that he was memorising her expressions. It wasn’t that he was worried he was going to forget – it was that he was worried he wouldn’t remember enough, and he wasn’t like Kermit, married to a photographer never knowingly without the means of snapping somebody’s image.

 

            Davy finished the coffee and came to a halt shortly before the Tube arrived at their stop, then took the empty paper bag away from Finn and wrapped them up together for easier binning. “So, that’s me,” she said, calmer and less animated now that she’d talked herself out, no longer feeling like she needed to update Finn on every tiny thing that had happened since they’d been apart for fear of losing touch with him. Long-distance relationships, Davy knew from personal experience, were delicate creatures. It was possibly the best thing about Finn that when she was around him, she never felt like she had to worry about messing up – everything else she did, she knew she was treading on eggshells, walking a razor-fine line between screwing up and carrying off the honours. But she didn’t want to risk screwing up.

 

            Maybe she overcompensated sometimes, Davy conceded, looking up into Finn’s warm brown eyes. Robbie didn’t seem to mind.

 

            Finn grinned down at her and brushed a hank of black hair off her face with careful, calloused fingertips.

 

            “How have you been?” Davy asked, and tucked herself more securely under his arm despite the stifling heat of the Tube. A little old lady on the seat opposite them beamed at them, and they both went bright red; fortunately, at that very moment the train pulled into Hammersmith station and they were able to escape.

 

            Finn wasn’t as talkative as Davy could be, even given the right audience, but he could get a lot across in a short sentence if you were listening carefully enough and once he got up some momentum he could monologue quite respectably. 68 Overstone Road was some distance from the station, so there was time for him to give Davy what she knew must be the edited highlights of the last two months. There wasn’t much of substance that hadn’t gone into his emails – which were short and dubiously spelt, but regular - but then, Davy’s work wasn’t anything like as highly classified as his, and the emails had missed out a lot of the details. It was always better when you were listening to it in person, anyway.

 

            Finn let them both into the house, opening the door for Davy with a sort of clumsy gallantry that made her smile. The effect was almost immediately ruined by Ross Jenkins falling down the stairs, rolling into the hall like some sort of springy rubber ball, and causing both Davy and Finn to leap backwards swearing.

 

            “You fucking moron,” Finn said with unusual venom, glaring at Ross.

 

            “How did you even do that?” Davy demanded. “No, don’t tell me, I don’t want an answer.”

 

            “Shit,” Ross said, unrolling himself and getting to his feet. He evidently realised who Davy was, because his eyes widened and he shot Finn a look of slightly panicked apology. “Er, I’ll just go put the kettle on.”

 

            “You do that,” Finn said, and ushered Davy into the house for the second time.

 

            It was, for once, tidy. Well, the living room looked like a bomb had hit it, bits of newspaper and shoes and books and other paraphernalia everywhere, but the rest of the house – including, to Davy’s surprise, Finn’s room – was immaculate. She dropped her backpack at the foot of Finn’s bed and sat down on it to take her shoes off. “Who the hell was that, tumbling down the stairs?”

 

            “Ross,” Finn said. “He’s a mate, but he’s… nearly as bad as me.”

 

            Davy snorted, and Finn went a bit pink but grinned.

 

            “I should probably tell Matt he fell headfirst down the stairs,” Finn announced with the air of someone who had discovered a particularly devious and painful method of revenge. “Matt will want to know. For, uh, medic stuff.”

 

            “You mean in case he’s concussed,” Davy said, addressing one Converse. The laces had somehow worked themselves into an unbreakable knot over the course of her nightmare trip from Bath. “Is your house always like this, by the way?” The last time she’d visited, she’d opened the kitchen door at just the right moment to discover that Blade could hit the bull’s-eye on a dartboard ninety-nine times out of a hundred; fortunately, Davy had opened the door on the hundredth occasion, and the knife that would otherwise have removed her left ear hit the front door and fell to the doormat with a clatter. Davy didn’t know this, but Blade had later remarked that being lectured about weapons safety by Finn would have been comical if Finn hadn’t been waving the knife in question under his nose at the time, looking dangerously as if he might just stuff it up Blade’s nostrils and solve the problem entirely.

 

            “Yup,” Finn said cheerfully, and Davy looked up just in time to see his face fall. “You don’t – um –”

 

            She smiled at him. “I don’t mind. It makes a nice change.”

 

            His grin threatened to take over his face. Davy’s heart did a neat double flip.

 

            “Tell you what,” she said, getting up. “I’ll go and see if that kettle Ross mentioned can be turned into tea, and you can go and enact revenge-by-proxy.”

 

            “Sounds good,” Finn said, and went upstairs like a herd of charging elephants.

 

            Davy shook her head, grinned faintly and trotted downstairs rather more quietly. It was nice to be back here: chaotic, accidentally dangerous and temperamental as it was, it was always warm in a way that felt home-like, a quality she’d never managed to inspire in her own depressingly temporary flat.

 

            She found Ross in the kitchen, sitting on the counter kicking his heels against the cupboards and looking about sixteen. The kettle was slowly coming to a boil beside him while he texted, and he looked up as she came in and went slightly pink.

 

            “I tripped,” he said, as if this explained anything.

 

            “What?” Davy said, finding two mugs and the tea.

 

            “That’s why I fell down the stairs. I, um, tripped.” Ross nodded and then switched focus to stare into the distant air and carefully pay no attention to Davy.

 

            Davy returned the favour. The kettle boiled, and she made two mugs of tea. “Ross? If you want a cuppa, you’d better make one.”

 

            “Okay. Um, thanks.”

 

            Davy had not encountered members of the SAS before last Christmas, but she was ninety-nine percent sure she had not expected them to say ‘um’ quite so much. She had definitely been expecting lethal self-assurance all day, every day, which just went to show, didn’t it. “No problem,” she said dryly, resisting the temptation to ruffle his hair the way her sister always ruffled hers, and collected her two mugs of tea to take upstairs. She had to stop in the hall and flatten herself against the wall, because Matt and Finn came hurtling down the stairs in front of her.

 

            “Hi Davy, nice to see you again,” Matt said, in his normal, pleasant tones, smiling warmly at her, before switching effortlessly to an exasperated bellow: “ _Ross Jenkins, where the fuck are you and what the fuck have you been doing with yourself_?”

 

            There was a faint, hastily-stifled squeak from the kitchen. Davy snorted, Finn sniggered, and Matt allowed the merest tremor of a grin to cross his face before striding purposefully into the kitchen.

 

            “Space cadet,” Davy remarked in an undertone, passing Finn his mug of tea as they went upstairs to escape the sound of Matt haranguing Ross about the loose bit of carpet he knew Blade was going to nail down tomorrow when he got a minute, and why the hell couldn’t he pay a bit of attention, and if he (Ross) dashed his brains out on the skirting board he (Matt) would preside over a séance to force him to complete the resulting paperwork from beyond the grave.

 

            Finn grinned and shook his head. “He’s met this girl, see?”

 

            “Oh god, of course he has,” Davy said, rolling her eyes. “He looks sixteen, but does he have to act like it?”

 

            An expression of deep thought passed across Finn’s face. Davy held her breath and wondered if she was about to be treated to a classic Finn aphorism that would combine breathtaking obliviousness with profound idiocy, or a piece of startling insight into Ross’s psychology. Either was equally likely.

 

            The expression passed, and Finn shrugged. “He probably just tripped on the stairs and feels bad that he nearly flattened you –”

 

            “Excuse you,” Davy said, reasonably confident that she could have got out of Ross’s way in time even if his trajectory had been right to knock her flat.

 

            Finn grinned, but didn’t apologise. “- and also, he has these cycles. He meets a girl he likes, he pines, he pines some more, and if she’s not interested then one day he walks away from it as if nothing happened.”

 

            “Are they never interested?” Davy said, surprised. “He does look like a kid, but he’s not – I don’t think most women would kick him out of bed for eating toast, if you know what I mean.” She stumbled awkwardly over her words.

 

            Finn nodded, preceding Davy into his room. “He picks women up sometimes, but not the ones he pines after. One of the pining ones was interested once. They dated for a bit and then broke up… before Christmas? Yeah.” Finn frowned. “We all had to listen to a fuckton of Evanescence.”

 

            Davy cringed as she wedged the door open a crack, to allow for a through-draft.

 

            “Blade fixed it,” Finn said serenely, sitting down on the bed and patting the covers next to him. “But this new one’s going to be a pining one, I can tell.”

 

            Davy sat down next to him and let herself melt into him a bit. She was not a naturally cuddly person, and it was bloody hot, but Finn had his window wide open and the niceness of being tangibly in his presence outweighed the irritation of being slightly over-warm. “Who is she?”

 

            “You’ll see her tonight,” Finn said. “Barmaid at the Swan. Her name’s Helena. She’s a bit like you, actually. Smart. Sharp. But not as pretty.”

 

            She pulled a face at him and he grinned and tugged the end of her ponytail gently. “Let me guess, she doesn’t know Ross exists, and he’s busy being emo about it?” she asked, in order to distract him.

 

            Finn snorted. “Pretty much.” He tilted his head and kissed her cheek. “’M not distracted. You are pretty.”

 

            Davy wrinkled her nose. “Most innocent compliment I’ve ever been given,” she said dryly, remembering the men at work who had commented on her looks, speculated about her capabilities in the sack, and, quite frequently, accused her of being a lesbian when she didn’t react the way they wanted her to.

 

            Finn smirked, and the broad, calloused hand that had been dangling loosely by her side slid up her t-shirt. “I can think of less innocent ones if you want.”

 

            Davy snickered and set her tea aside. “You can shut the bloody door first.”

 

***

 

            They had a pleasant evening at the Swan – a decent dinner, a few drinks, and a darts match that Davy won by a landslide, to her extreme satisfaction and the cheers of the few people in the pub who knew Finn vaguely and had grasped that he was out with his girlfriend and discreetly playing to lose. They followed that up with a pool match Finn wasn’t trying to lose, and which they wound up fighting viciously: Davy won again, and Finn laughed and bought her a drink and didn’t seem the slightest bit annoyed or intimidated, which made her happy. Davy also had the opportunity to scrutinise the barmaid Helena, making mental notes for Claire and Cara’s edification and possible later discussion with the others at the house. It always paid to be informed, even if the redhead seemed – as Finn had said – smart, sharp and uninterested in Ross. Davy put gossip out of her mind, and focussed on the last bowl of chips she was sharing with Finn. She definitely needed to go running tomorrow, she thought, mentally tallying up her food intake for the day. Lucky that had been on the cards anyway, and she’d brought her kit.

 

            The five-minute trip back to the house in the slow blue darkness of a late spring evening was a nice conclusion to their date, too; warm, but with just enough of a bite in the air and few enough people around that Davy didn’t feel uncomfortable putting her arm around Finn’s waist and pulling his arm over her shoulders, which made him happy. Davy was floating in a cloud of things that made her happy and things that made him happy, all of them feeding back into each other, twisting and turning like a Mobius strip so that sheer joy that she was here and he was here and they were together fizzed under her skin like electricity - all of which combined made her realise that she was drunk as well as happy. She had totally forgotten about Finn’s housemates, or about Claire, Cara and Lizzie wanting to know about Blade’s new girlfriend, until she and Finn bumped into Blade going into 68 Overstone Road just as they arrived back.

 

            “Oh. Hi,” Blade said as if he was surprised, which he clearly wasn’t. Davy had spotted him watching them come up the road. “Nice evening?”

 

            “Yeah, great,” Finn said expansively. “You?”

 

            Blade smiled rather shyly, teeth flashing in the glow of a nearby streetlamp. “Yeah. Yeah, it was good. Hi, Davy, how are you?”

 

            Davy returned something vaguely coherent as a reply, too shocked by that smile to be clear. Not just smiling, but _shy_?

 

            “How’s –” Finn started, and then Blade flashed him a warning look, and Finn closed his mouth with a snap. “Sorry, mate.”

 

            Blade just shook his head and let them both in.

 

            “Any other woman would think you two were keeping a secret,” Davy said tartly, tripping over the doormat and catching herself just before she fell face flat on the floor. “Subtle, lads, really subtle.”

 

            Blade laughed, and Davy nearly had a heart attack. Finn just grinned sheepishly. “Sorry, Davy,” Blade said, with an easy charm totally foreign to any of Davy’s previous interactions with him. “Night, you two.”

 

            Davy waited until they were upstairs, Finn’s door bolted shut, all the lights out, and then said softly “You’re keeping a secret from me, Robbie.”

 

            Finn kissed her. He tasted like toothpaste and apologies, and his hands on her waist were slightly too hot and just tight enough. “Yeah. Does it bother you?”

 

            Davy paused for a second to think about it, to weigh up everything she liked about Finn against the fact that he was always going to have to keep secrets from her. This was only one more, one little one that she’d probably find out anyway soon, and that and the fact that he was openly refusing to tell her were the only things that separated it from all the other secrets he had to keep.

 

            “Davy?” Finn said, and he sounded worried and she realised she’d paused too long.

 

            “Doesn’t bother me,” she breathed, and smiled against his skin. “Promise. Okay?”

 

            “Okay,” Finn said, voice full of relief. His dark-hidden hands pulled the tie off her plait. “Coming to bed?”

 

            “Yeah,” Davy said.

 

 

            Unfortunately for Finn’s heroic attempts to keep Blade’s secret for him, the next morning Matt walked straight into the kitchen and said “Oh, hi, Blade. How’s Lorraine? How was your date?”

 

            Davy wiped her grin off her face, stepped out from behind the kitchen door, and casually started digging through the fridge for the carton of orange juice Finn swore blind was in there. Sometimes, you just had to be lucky.

 

            “Oh,” Matt said weakly, tracking Davy’s progress with his eyes. “Shit.” Blade turned away from all of them while he put the kettle on and, presumably, pretended that none of them existed. Finn let out a long sigh and dropped his head into his hands. Ross suddenly discovered something urgent to do at the other end of the house.

 

            Davy found the orange juice, poured herself a glass and set both glass and carton down on the table, patting Finn surreptitiously on the shoulder as she went. She sat down next to him and, without making eye contact with any of the housemates still in the kitchen, said: “I didn’t know you had a girlfriend, Blade.”

 

            Finn shot her a look that managed to be both agonised and accusatory. She pushed the instant coffee jar in his general direction and squeezed his knee in reassurance under the table. He did not look reassured.

 

            Blade made a subterranean noise and stared intently at the kettle.

 

            Matt became suddenly very interested in cereal.

 

            Davy waited patiently.

 

            Eventually, Blade decided that a verbal contribution was called for. “We’re dating. But, um…”

 

            “Not seriously?” Davy filled her tone with all the understanding she could squeeze into two words.

 

            “No!” Blade said hastily. “No, I, just – er –” He stared at Matt, a faint but discernible air of panic to him.

 

            Davy watched in absolute fascination. Finn rested his head on the table and gave an almost inaudible moan of distress. Davy nudged her foot against his, but otherwise ignored him.

 

            “Well,” Blade concluded, now distinctly pink under his faint tan, and the kettle finally boiled.

 

            “Pass the kettle, mate, I need coffee,” Finn said, face still mashed against the table.

 

            Blade looked as if he might pour the kettle over Finn’s head.

           

            “Don’t blame him,” Davy said. “It was Matt. Robbie tried very hard not to tell me.”

 

            Blade looked outraged for half a second, and then a wry sort of smirk caught at his wide mouth and twisted it into something that was almost a humorous expression. Davy would have liked to have caught it on camera, but it was gone too fast. “You’re a sodding menace, Davina Bowie.”

 

            “And you’re much nicer to be around now you’ve got a date, Niall Richards,” Davy returned gleefully, precipitating a return of the pinkness.

 

            Blade mumbled something unrepeatable and slammed the kettle down in front of Finn’s face. Because Finn’s reflexes were a marvel, Finn was upright and six inches away when it slopped boiling water everywhere, so Davy didn’t bother saying anything.

 

            Finn gave a heavy sigh, stared forlornly at the kettle, and then said to Blade: “It’s not going to last, you know, mate?”

 

            Blade nearly dropped a plate. “The _fuck_?”

 

            “Not you and Lorraine!” Finn corrected hastily. “I mean, the, uh… the not telling anyone. Kermit’s already talked to Cara.”

 

            Blade muttered something even more unrepeatable.

 

            “I’ll tell Cara you said that,” Davy said breezily, memorising it. “She’ll take it as the compliment it wasn’t. She always hates it when people think she’s a boring twenty-something just because she’s married with a kid.”

 

            Finn and Blade gave her identical looks of total incomprehension.

 

            Davy shrugged. “It’s a thing, apparently. Along with patronising comments about being too young to have a kid. She does look about sixteen, so people assume stuff.”

 

            Finn and Blade looked at each other, then looked away.

 

            “Promise you won’t tell Claire and Cara and Mrs Preston,” Blade said eventually. “They’ll freak her out.”

 

            “I can stop them,” Davy said, wondering if this was going to lead to further information being divulged.

 

            Blade shot her a look of profound doubt.

 

            “Okay, fine,” Davy said mildly. “Don’t tell me anything.” She smiled at Blade.

 

            “That’s fucking unnerving,” Blade remarked, tone accusatory, his usual jade-eyed glare of death in full evidence. He even pointed at Davy for good measure, one blunt finger stabbing the air.

 

            “What?” Davy demanded, taken aback.

 

            Finn made a tactical retreat into his coffee mug so that neither of them could see his expression.

 

            “You never smile at me,” Blade said suspiciously.

 

            “Because you’re usually a twat,” Davy said, irritated.

 

            “Run,” Finn said loudly, getting up with such haste that he sent his chair flying.

 

            “Good advice,” Blade said, dodging the chair.

 

            “What, from _Blade_?” Davy said, insulted.

 

            “No,” Finn said, grabbing Davy’s wrist with more efficacy than elegance or gentleness. “I meant we were planning on going for a run.”

 

            “Have fun,” Blade said, imbuing it with tones of ‘don’t come back’.

 

            “Thanks, we will,” Davy said, imbuing it with tones of ‘burn in hell, you wanker’.

 

            Finn just looked pained.

 

***

           

_Text from Davy Bowie, sent Sunday, May 3 rd, to Claire Bradley and Cara Cooper._

 

Blade does have a girlfriend! Her name is Lorraine and she’s clearly great for him but he’s still a twat. Just a better-behaved twat.

 

_Text from Claire Bradley, sent Sunday, May 3 rd, to Cara Cooper and Davy Bowie._

 

wonders will never cease

 

_Text from Cara Cooper, sent Sunday, May 3 rd, to Davy Bowie and Claire Bradley._

 

DETAILS

 

_Text from Davy Bowie, sent Sunday, May 3 rd, to Claire Bradley and Cara Cooper._

 

He BLUSHES when you mention her its fucking adorable!

 

_Text from Cara Cooper, sent Sunday, May 3 rd, to Davy Bowie and Claire Bradley._

Uh you remember what i said about not getting stabbed right?

 

_Text from Davy Bowie, sent Sunday, May 3 rd, to Claire Bradley and Cara Cooper._

He wants to date her seriously! I don’t care if I’m martyred in the cause of intel this is too good to miss

 

_Text from Claire Bradley, sent Sunday, May 3 rd, to Davy Bowie and Cara Cooper._

 

Finn is going to think you came to ldn to interrogate Blade, haha.

 

_Text from Davy Bowie, sent Sunday, May 3 rd, to Cara Cooper and Claire Bradley._

 

I don’t think so lol

 

_Text from Claire Bradley, sent Sunday, May 3rd, to Cara Cooper and Davy Bowie._

 

‘lol’? are you even serious right now? Are you an adult or not?

 

_Text from Davy Bowie, sent Sunday, May 3rd, to Cara Cooper and Claire Bradley._

 

Going by this conversation I am a gossipy schoolkid and so are you 2.         


	4. Chapter 4

            The late morning of the 22nd of June found Claire still half-asleep over her coffee, quietly luxuriating in the caffeine and the book she was reading. She had somehow completed her marking for the weekend last night, an unlikely feat that Sisyphus would have been proud of, and so she could justify reading fiction. This close to her students’ public exams, it was a strange, guilty feeling, but that wasn’t going to stop her enjoying it.

 

            The bell rang.

 

            “I’ve got it!” Ditzy yelled, and stampeded for the front door.

 

            “Mm,” Claire said in pleasantly absent tones, leafing slowly through her book. She heard the sounds of the door opening and a large group of people, mostly male, being ushered in, at which point she remembered she was wearing nothing other than an oversized t-shirt of Ditzy’s and a pair of knickers with small rainbows on. This thought paralysed her for a moment, and then she decided that – since the shirt was opaque and long enough to cover her arse – she didn’t care enough to run upstairs and change, and, moreover, that behaving as if her attire were out of the ordinary would only draw attention to it.

 

            The large group of people percolated into the kitchen. “Good morning,” Claire said, and bestowed an impartial smile on the company. It consisted of Stephen, Ryan, Davy, Finn, Blade, and Lyle.

 

            “Did you forget your trousers, Claire?” Lyle demanded, since good manners had never prevented him from saying or doing anything.

 

            Davy, sweet, darling angel that she was, bounced an orange off his head. Claire smiled benignly.

 

            “These are my pyjamas,” Claire said. “I am not yet dressed.”

 

            “Why not?” Lyle demanded, apparently not having learnt his lesson. Finn had retrieved the orange for Davy, and they were now sharing it between the two of them. Adorable.

 

            “Because it is eleven-thirty on a Saturday morning and I didn’t go to bed till one,” Claire said gently.

 

            Lyle waggled his eyebrows, managing to make himself look even more craggy and disreputable than normal. “Ditzy keeping you up all night?”

 

            “I wish,” Ditzy muttered, wrestling a tent out of a cupboard.

 

            “Davy, sweetie,” Claire said with charm and poison, “find something to throw at Ditzy, won’t you? I don’t mind what. The Yellow Pages will do nicely, I can promise you it won’t dent his thick skull. No, Jonathan, it was my marking. Which I did in one hectic rush so that I could spend time with my partner and his friends, for reasons which now totally escape me.”

 

            The Yellow Pages flew through the air and clipped the top of Ditzy’s head. Blade caught it and returned it to Davy, after batting Ditzy solidly about the ears; he had ducked to accommodate violence from Davy, but hadn’t been expecting it from Blade.

 

            “Traitor,” Ditzy said piteously.

 

            Blade just looked impassive. Ryan grinned, and Stephen looked slightly awkward, but Stephen often looked slightly awkward in large groups of people. Finn popped the last segment of orange into Davy’s mouth, and quietly binned the peel. Claire was struck by how similar they looked in terms of posture, a matched, scarily competent-looking pair with casually folded arms and heads held high, never mind that Davy dissolved into a friendly smile and gregarious disposition at a touch, and Finn spent most of his off-duty time as an amiable idiot.

 

            Claire drained her coffee and set the cup down with a click. “If you’ll all get out of my kitchen doorway, gentlemen and lady, then I can get a move on with my morning.” She stood with dignity, observed that Stephen and Finn had both fixed their eyes politely on the ceiling, Blade looked as if he hadn’t noticed her existence, Ryan was checking something on his phone and Davy looked as if she might burst out laughing, while Lyle was evidently brewing up some mischief. She made a small, imperious hand gesture, and the Red Sea of assorted Special Forces and their partners shuffled out of her way. It was like cutting a swathe through a hallway full of twelve-year-olds, but without the terror factor that a mob of twelve-year-olds induces.

 

            “’S nearly afternoon,” Lyle muttered. Claire flicked his ear on the way past, since if you were going to be insouciant and carry things off with a high hand you needed to follow through. “Ow!”

 

            Ditzy grinned at her, errant tent retrieved from its store cupboard and propped up against the wall, and she gave him a smacking kiss on the lips and evaded a wandering hand. “Make us another coffee, there’s a love,” she said, and proceeded upstairs with calm and élan. She was about ninety percent certain that Ditzy was watching her go and very sure that nobody else could see her from the kitchen, so she put a bit more swing into her hips than strictly necessary.

 

            Distantly, she heard the sound of the kettle going on.

 

 

            Lunch was, of course, takeaway; Claire flatly refused to cook for so many people on no notice, and she knew Ditzy felt the same way. Since the weather was nice, and looking promising for the rest of the day and tomorrow, they spilled out into the garden and ate Chinese takeaway on the grass. A lot of beer got consumed. Claire mentally named herself as designated driver, noticed that Davy also wasn’t drinking, and carefully did not notice the number of other people who were. On the pretext of sharing her Peking crispy duck, she went and sat by Davy, who had penned Stephen into a corner and was gently questioning him about Blade’s girlfriend.

 

            Claire checked Blade’s whereabouts. He was arguing about something with Finn, and unusual energy was going into it. Claire caught something about ‘skidmarks’ and ‘soap’, uttered in tones of considerable affront that were getting more Yorkshire by the second, and decided both that she didn’t want to know and that Davy and Stephen’s fun little interrogation game was probably safe for the moment. Stephen was certainly enjoying himself returning non-committal or ambiguous answers, and they were both giggling at each other, so no harm had likely been done yet.

 

            “Come to play good cop?” Stephen said as Claire sat down and put the plate of crispy duck between the three of them. He was wearing his most enchanting grin, the one that lit up his blue eyes and set them to dancing; Ryan glanced over at him and smiled broadly, expression warm and relaxed in a way Claire had never seen before the two of them got together.

 

            “Nope, just to remind you that Blade is literally right there, and you know the boys’ hearing is always good exactly when you don’t want it to be.” Claire licked hoisin sauce off her thumb and watched Davy painstakingly assemble a very large wrap full of duck, sauce and spring onion. “Does anyone know what the plans for this afternoon are?”

 

            “You mean you don’t?” Davy said through a mouthful of duck, thereby proving that the match between her and Finn was not as unexpected as you might think.

 

            “Of course I bloody don’t,” Claire said. “I was expecting all of you two hours later than you actually turned up.”

 

            Stephen stretched his long legs out and nibbled on a piece of cucumber. “Cara and Kermit are joining us at two-thirty, and then we’re heading over to the campsite.”

 

            “Ha,” Claire said. “Field.”

 

            Stephen smirked and dedicated himself to creating the world’s tidiest wrap. A ladybird crawled onto his paper plate, and he carefully lifted it off and let it toddle around one elegant, long-fingered hand before ceremoniously replacing it on a leaf.

 

            Davy chewed and swallowed the last of her wrap. “That late? Cara told me they were taking Beth over to Kermit’s sister’s at ten. I asked if she wanted us to stop by her house on the way to yours.”

 

            “And she said no? Funny, that.” Claire waggled her eyebrows, and then paused to ask herself if she’d possibly been with Ditzy a few years too long. Davy sniggered.

 

            “That’s a Ditzy expression,” Stephen said, now smirking at Claire.

 

            Claire’s face did something without her prior permission, and Davy and Stephen both burst out laughing, full and unreserved and seriously startling the lads, who looked vaguely suspicious at this evidence of mirth and amusement. They were probably wondering if a joke had just been told against them.

 

            “Oh Christ,” Davy gasped, wiping her eyes on the edge of her t-shirt. “Oh, Claire.”

 

            “Speaking,” Claire said, annoyed but aware that her mouth was twitching and she wasn’t doing a very good job of covering her amusement. It had to be something pretty special to have got Davy _and_ Stephen to laugh so loudly; she sort of wished they’d photographed the expression for posterity, except then of course it would have gone straight on Facebook and a lot of other people would be laughing too. Davy, among people she knew and trusted, could be the life and soul of the party, but Stephen’s skittishness was semi-permanent, however much he’d relaxed since Claire had met him. A year ago, Claire thought he wouldn’t have laughed at all.

 

            “Your _face_ ,” Stephen choked out. He leant over and patted her on the knee. “It’s okay, Claire, you mostly don’t look and act like Ditzy…”

 

            “Oh, fuck you,” Claire said, and flipped Davy off when she hiccupped with laughter.

 

            “What?” Ditzy bawled from the other end of the garden. “Is my name being taken in vain? Again?”

 

            “Yes,” Claire yelled back. “We’re comparing notes here!”

 

            “On what?” Ditzy shouted. Everyone was now listening. Hell, there were probably people in Timbuktu that were listening. Ditzy’s outdoor voice could be heard from both ends of Twickenham stadium.

 

            Claire waggled her eyebrows again. “Don’t you wish you knew?”

 

            “They’re going to think we’re comparing dick sizes,” Davy predicted, draining most of a bottle of ginger beer.

 

            “Of course they are,” Claire said fondly. “Wait, we haven’t had that conversation yet, have we?”

 

            Stephen looked vaguely ill. “No, and we don’t need to!”

 

            Claire and Davy swivelled to stare at him.

 

            “ _Communal showers_ ,” Stephen said.

 

            “What,” Davy said, saying what all three of them were thinking, “you take a ruler in, just to check?”

 

            Stephen looked pained. “No. Can we get off the topic of people’s cocks?”

 

            Davy tried to laugh and snorted ginger beer out of her nose instead; she doubled over and made a high-pitched noise of discomfort: too many carbonated bubbles, not enough nostril. Finn looked over at once, and Davy gave him a pained smile and a wave that clearly somewhat reassured him, as he turned back. They were now all taking it in turns to throw knives at a large square of plywood with a target clumsily rendered in marker pen on it. Claire didn’t propose to intervene unless one of them missed, and none of them had yet.

 

            “If you insist,” Claire said. She took a gulp of her own apple juice, and picked absently at a half-open plastic container of noodle things. She nodded significantly at the plain silver band on the fourth finger of Stephen’s right hand. “How’s the wedding planning going? And why are you wearing your ring on that hand?”

 

            Stephen reflexively covered his right hand with his left. “It’s difficult to find a men’s engagement ring that doesn’t look ridiculous, I’m not wearing one if Ryan isn’t, and there’s no point buying four rings for two people. We’ll just move hands when we get hitched.”

 

            “Logic,” Davy remarked approvingly. “Can I see?”

 

            Stephen hesitated.

 

            “You don’t have to take it off if you don’t want to,” Davy said, grinning.

 

            Stephen evidently decided that taking off the ring was a lesser evil than letting her touch his hand, and carefully pulled the ring from his finger. It shone dully, quiet and discreet, like brushed steel, and it fit neatly on his hand, fit with who he was and what he looked like: it looked like the sort of ring he should own. Claire had noticed that Ryan’s, although almost identical to Stephen’s – the same finish, the same width of band – was a sort of dull gold colour, and it also looked like it belonged on his hand. Claire had seen clothes that Ryan had bought for Stephen before, since Stephen was apparently allergic to clothes-shopping but liked wearing nice things and Ryan liked seeing Stephen happy, and she suspected Ryan of having an untapped and unacknowledged aesthetic sense.

 

            Davy handled the ring with caution, obedient to Stephen’s obvious discomfort, and Claire leaned in to look at it. It looked huge in Davy’s small hands, of course, but it was obviously well-made; Davy tilted it against the light so she and Claire could read the engraving. It was only four letters, Stephen and Ryan’s initials, but somewhere between the lines of those four letters you could read how much they meant to each other. At least, if you knew them, you could.

 

            Claire thought about the Stephen she had first met – superficially very charming but perceptibly ill-at-ease, though less so around Tom – and compared it to him now, sitting in her back garden showing off his engagement ring, and had a severe attack of the warm fuzzies. Davy handed the ring back to Stephen, who was getting visibly antsier without it on his hand, and Stephen slipped it straight back onto his finger. The tense lines of his shoulders relaxed at once.

 

            “Suppose you’ll want to get engaged now,” Ditzy remarked, and his shadow fell across Claire as he joined them.

 

            She looked up at him, one hand raised against the bright sun, and grinned. She could hear the joke in his voice, or she might actually have been mildly concerned; their names were on all the crucial bits of each other’s paperwork. They’d had an awkward conversation along these lines a year or so ago, and discovered that both of them, like Mae West, felt that marriage was a fine institution but they weren’t ready for an institution. “I enjoy living in sin with you,” she informed him. “It gives my mother the heebie-jeebies, which means she isn’t complaining about how I’m not a headmistress yet.”

 

            “Oh, I see,” Ditzy said, pulling her to her feet and planting a kiss on the end of her nose. “So I’m the sacrificial lamb?”

 

            “Stalking horse,” Claire corrected. “And do you seriously mean to say you can’t cope with one measly sixty-something Yorkshirewoman?”

           

            “The way she handles a roasting fork would give Blade nightmares. I think we’re out of kitchen towel.”

 

            “You romantic bastard,” Claire said affectionately. “To think I thought you wanted to talk to me. The kitchen towel is next to the washing machine, I bought a new pack last week.”

 

            “I looked there, I can’t find it.”

 

            “You’re kidding me,” Claire said, experiencing a certain amount of doubt as to whether she actually had bought a new pack of kitchen towel. “Excuse me, guys.”

 

            Davy shrugged and Stephen murmured something; he was turning his ring on his finger and watching Ryan, a quiet smile in his eyes. Davy rolled her eyes and mounted an attack on the remainder of the crispy duck, so Claire took it as read that she could leave her guests to entertain themselves and went in search of the kitchen towel. Ditzy followed her.

 

            Inside the house, in the repurposed cupboard of a room that contained a washing machine, a dryer and a miniscule sink, Claire found not one but two four-packs of kitchen towel. She was therefore not remotely surprised when Ditzy’s hands landed on her hips, and she laughed as she turned in his grip to kiss him.

 

            “Just remembered,” Ditzy said, grinning in a vaguely self-conscious way that indicated that he was about to say something seriously cheesy that he actually meant, probably inspired by Stephen and Ryan being unsubtly besotted all over their house. “I haven’t told you I love you today.”

             

            “You romantic bastard,” Claire repeated, and put her arms around his neck.

 

 

            Five minutes later, the doorbell rang.

 

            “Bugger,” Claire said, hastily putting her shirt back on and her hair into some kind of order. “You get the kitchen towel, I’ll field Darren and Cara.”

 

            “Yes ma’am,” Ditzy said, and ripped open the offending packet.

 

            Claire exited the utility room at speed and went to open the front door, establishing, with a quick glance in the hall mirror, that she wasn’t too badly disarrayed – although there was nothing to be done about her hair, curly hair was by its very nature unruly, and nobody would be too surprised if she looked slightly haywire. She found Kermit and Cara looking extremely haywire.

 

            “Hi, Claire!” Cara said cheerily, and Claire hugged her. “Is everyone through in the garden?”

 

            “Yes, go straight through. Hello, Darren, how nice to see you. It’s been ages.” Claire hugged Kermit as well, and ushered them both into the house.

 

            “Um, Claire…” Kermit lingered, slightly pink.

 

            “Yes?” Claire said warily. When he spoke directly to her, Kermit, like Finn, usually treated her as a slightly alarming aunt: on friendly terms, but liable to explode if treated with insufficient care.

 

            “You’ve – um. Your shirt.”

 

            “What?” Claire demanded, and realised a split second later that what he meant was that her shirt was on inside out. “Oh, bollocks.”

 

            Kermit grinned and vanished, and Claire ran upstairs to turn her shirt the right way round. The chances of running into one of her boyfriend’s colleagues if she did it downstairs were unacceptably high.


	5. Chapter 5

            With Kermit and Cara present, the group was complete enough to move off to the campsite that Claire was still thinking of as Ditzy’s field; Lizzie and Major Preston were supposed to be joining them later, when matters had been arranged into some semblance of respectability, everyone was calm and food was underway. Claire personally entertained doubts as to whether ‘calm’ and ‘camping’ were words that could be included in the same sentence, particularly given that Ditzy seemed bent on micro-managing the entire thing, but it was apparent from the casual remarks that the lads slung back and forth as they got ready to head off that all the soldiers considered the weekend’s camping to be a pleasant diversion rather than a potential disaster. Since Stephen inexplicably turned out to be a fan of wild camping, and Davy was inured to a certain level of discomfort, this meant that Claire and Cara were the only real doubting Thomases present. Doubting Thomasinas? Claire wondered. Well, either way, being the only ones sneaking each other dubious glances was wearing. Claire was already thanking God that her period wasn’t due for a fortnight, because she seriously didn’t know what she would have done under those circumstances, and the thought of having to ask someone for advice on the subject was enough to make even practical Claire quail slightly. The mere fact of the trowel, loo roll and hand sanitiser Ditzy had casually included in their packing was enough to make her wince. Fortunately, there was a pub just up the road from the field, and Claire had every intention of exploiting its facilities, but she had serious misgivings about the others’ plans.

 

            The campsite was half an hour’s drive away, a little out of Hereford; it was surprisingly pretty, a low, rolling bit of slope that turned into a hill on the other side of the road and bordered a small wood. As Claire, obeying Ditzy’s somewhat eccentric directions, made for the large steel gate into the field, Ditzy proudly informed her that there was a brook in the wood.

 

            “Oh yes?” Claire said. “So I can put you out when you set yourselves on fire?”

 

            Ditzy grinned and bounced out of the car to open the gate. Claire banged her head gently against the steering wheel, and reflected that however badly this went wrong, it had at least made him happy for a bit.

 

            Luckily, there was nobody else in the car to see her. Blade and Finn had driven down in a shared car that belonged to them and their housemates, collecting Davy and her kit from a train station intermediate between Bath and Hereford on the way, while Kermit and Cara had, of course, brought their own car. Stephen and Ryan had driven down in theirs, bringing Lyle with them. Claire momentarily entertained herself by wondering which would be the least pleasant car to share, Blade, Davy’s and Finn’s with Blade and Davy poking at each other in their eternal pissing contest, or Stephen, Ryan’s and Lyle’s, considering Lyle’s sense of humour.

 

            Claire recovered from this daydream, having ascertained that she’d prefer the latter – Lyle could be dealt with, and even if Stephen and Ryan had shagged in that car they were old enough and sensible enough to clear it up – just in time to drive into the field and park neatly in the spot indicated by Ditzy, who was waving his arms like Air Traffic Control. She sat and waited for several moments while he organised the cars in a clearly pre-determined fashion which meant that they could all manoeuvre out of the field without disturbing any of the others and allowed for the possibility of headlights lighting the campsite area in an emergency. Claire eyed the arrangement emerging as Kermit and Cara circled neatly into place, Kermit at the wheel, and asked herself if Ditzy had also arranged this to maximise sound barriers between particular tents. She wouldn’t put it past him.

 

            Regardless of how comprehensive Ditzy’s campsite planning was intended to be, he certainly had fixed ideas about how it was supposed to work and no intention of tolerating deviation from those ideas. Claire found herself watching as Ditzy set about ordering the site, telling people where to set up their tents and energetically assisting various people with theirs – Kermit was pleased enough with the help, since Cara didn’t have a long enough reach to be useful in constructing their large tent, but Claire was sure she saw Finn grab Davy’s wrist and say something placating when Ditzy bustled over to join them. She waited until she saw a sequence of movements that indicated that Blade had just flashed a knife at Ditzy in warning, and then pulled her phone out of her pocket. There was a reason their barbecues and Boxing Day parties always ran to the same template, orchestrated by Ditzy, but there was also a reason that Claire and Ditzy had been together for three years and nothing had yet blown up. Nor had Claire worried about this midsummer barbecue solely because of the aerial obstacle course and the fireworks: as far as she was concerned, everything that required Ditzy to operate in unfamiliar circumstances brought out the control freak in him, an aspect of his personality not tolerable by civilians. Outside work, Ditzy liked predictable situations with less room for things to go wrong; Claire suspected that the army had initially appealed to his natural tendency to nitpick.

 

            _Stop being a busybody and come and set up our tent,_ she sent. _Everyone here knows how to put up a tent except Cara and me._

 

            There was no immediate response, although Ditzy clapped a hand to his pocket as if his phone had just buzzed.

 

            _Jon is laughing at you_ , Claire texted, and had the pleasure of seeing Ditzy read his texts, eye Lyle suspiciously, and then shrug, turn and walk back over to her.

 

            “Stop trying so hard,” Claire recommended when he got close enough.

 

            Ditzy grimaced.

 

            Claire kicked the poles and fabric that were supposed to turn into a tent meaningfully. “I should have listened to my sister. All doctors are control freaks who think they know best.”

 

            Ditzy opened his mouth, stopped, eyed Claire, and closed his mouth again. “Sorry.”

 

            Claire rolled her eyes at him. “Just loosen up.”

 

            Ryan came over to join them, and Claire gave him a bright smile. Ryan was Ditzy’s best friend, so far as she could tell; from the way Ditzy’s brother sometimes talked, Ryan had taken his place as Ditzy’s closest confidant and most immediate partner in crime. Claire saw no point in resenting this, particularly when she could tap Ryan’s seemingly endless fount of Ditzy-handling knowledge. At the moment, Ryan’s almost stolid countenance was wearing a faint rueful smile, and his blue eyes met Claire’s green ones in a moment of perfect solidarity.

 

            Claire attempted telepathic communication through the simple medium of staring very hard. _Get this moron out of my hair and calm him down._

 

            “Claire, Stephen wanted to ask you something,” Ryan said. “Dave, do you want a hand with that tent? Where do you want it?”

 

            Claire heard only the vaguest remnants of Ditzy’s response, which already sounded calmer and less keyed up. She was too busy walking as quickly as possible down to where Stephen was standing by his and Ryan’s tent, talking to Lyle, who was allegedly sharing with Blade. Since the tent they proposed to use was, even to Claire’s inexperienced eye, meant for one person only, Claire wasn’t sure how this was going to work. When she got within sensible talking range, she said so.

 

            Lyle grinned. “Blade’s skinny enough. Besides, it was that or share Kermit and Cara’s.” He pulled a flask from his back pocket and held it out to Claire. “Here.”  


            “What is it?” Claire said, eyeing it darkly.

 

            “Moonshine,” Stephen said, at the same time as Lyle said something unpronounceable and vaguely Eastern European. It sounded so much like a caricature that Claire was immediately suspicious.

 

            “You made that up,” she accused, took a gulp, and nearly choked on it. “Bloody _fucking_ hell, Jon.”

 

            “Home-brewed,” Lyle said unapologetically, and added: “Not by me, you nasty-minded woman. Sip it.”

 

            “I’ll be hammered before you can say Jack Robinson.” Claire sipped carefully at the flask anyway, once the burning in her throat had died, and found that – carefully applied – it was warming, and had a pleasant sort of plum aftertaste. “Ryan said you wanted to ask me something, Stephen?”

 

            “Mostly what I wanted to know is how the hell you put up with Ditzy when he’s in this mood,” Stephen said. He nodded at something over Claire’s shoulder.

 

            Claire turned to see Ryan and Ditzy having what she devoutly hoped was a friendly altercation over tent construction. She turned back again in a hurry. “He doesn’t do it very often – only when he’s planned something, really doesn’t want it to go wrong, and hasn’t had the opportunity to do a dry run. According to his brother, he insisted on three mocks before his actual driving test. He seems to cope just fine with actual emergencies, though, he was great when next door’s boiler blew up. Does he ever do it at work?”

 

            Lyle shook his head. “Not Ditzy.”

 

            “What a tosser,” Claire said affectionately, took an over-large sip of Lyle’s moonshine and coughed. She already felt light-headed. “God.” She stuffed the flask back into Lyle’s hands. “That stuff is evil.”

 

            Lyle took a healthy swig. “It could be worse.”

 

            “If that’s the best you’ve got to say for it, you shouldn’t be drinking it!”

 

            “The drunker I am, the less OCD Ditz will annoy me.” Lyle screwed the cap back onto the flask and stuck it back into his pocket.

 

            Claire shook her head and folded her arms. “If I turn around, am I going to see Ryan deck Dave?”

 

            “No,” Stephen assured her. “Ryan promised he’d calm him down.”

 

            “That’ll work,” Claire said gloomily, even though she herself had been hoping that Ryan would do just that. “Ditzy’s always convinced he’s totally calm.”

 

            “Well, right now he’s swearing at Ryan and putting your tent up and they’re both laughing, so that’s good,” Stephen said practically.

 

            “Oh. Okay.” Claire shifted her weight. “By the way, have you and Ryan set a date?”

 

            Lyle snickered and vanished at speed.

 

            “Not yet,” Stephen said, and added hastily: “Lyle was dropped off at ours in a Merc.”

 

            “What?” Claire said, diverted. “Who was driving it?”

 

            “We don’t know,” Stephen said. “We live four floors up and we weren’t looking for anyone in particular. But it was definitely a Mercedes, and how many British racing green Mercedes are there in London?”

 

            “Hundreds, probably,” Claire said, mentally adding this to the little list of Lizzie’s guesses about the identity of Lyle’s alleged gentleman or lady caller.

 

            “How many people is _Lyle_ likely to know who drive British racing green Mercedes?”

 

            “Fewer,” Claire conceded, “but when you consider that his mum and stepdad are loaded, probably a lot more than your average person. D’you have any idea who it could be? Lizzie said she thought Lyle had someone.”

 

            Stephen shook his head. “I think Ryan knows something.”

 

            “Have you asked him?”

 

            “No,” Stephen said. “He wouldn’t tell me if he did know.”

 

            Cara came over and snuggled up to Claire. “You’re talking secrets.”

 

            “How can you tell?” Claire said, putting an absent-minded arm around Cara’s thin shoulders.

 

            “Poor Stephen looks like you’ve nailed his foot to the floor and he can’t get away.”

 

            Stephen grinned. “Ground’s too damp. It wouldn’t work. Is your tent sorted?”

 

            Cara nodded. “Ditzy fixed it. And now Darren is setting things on fire.”

 

            Claire looked over her shoulder. Kermit was indeed setting up the barbecue, ably assisted by Finn (oh, no, Claire thought) and Davy (thank God, Claire sighed). It occurred to her to wonder what Ditzy was doing if he wasn’t setting up the barbecue, and she turned around further, perforce dragging Cara with her. Stephen moved so he could stand with them instead of staring down at the tops of their heads, and Claire picked out Ditzy, standing beside their now-constructed tent talking to Ryan.

 

            “Heart-to-heart,” Stephen said.

 

            “Bless,” Cara murmured, acquired a bottle of cider, and handed it to Stephen who chivalrously snapped the top off and handed it back to her. Cara took a healthy gulp.

 

            “How can you tell?” Claire twirled a strand of Cara’s long caramel hair around one finger, and tried to guess what Ditzy and Ryan had been saying to each other. Whatever it had been, they’d stopped, and they were telegraphing relief loud and clear.

 

            “The way Ryan’s standing,” Stephen said, and shrugged awkwardly. “The look on his face. The fact that it lasted less than thirty seconds and they’re both now drinking.”

 

            Cara snorted cider out of her nose and Claire chuckled. “Well, that makes sense,” she said, and let go of Cara. “I’ll just go and sort myself out.”

 

            She headed back over towards Ditzy, who was making for their car. Behind her, Cara snuggled up to Stephen like an unusually persistent limpet; Claire glanced quickly over her shoulder and saw surprise flash momentarily across his face before melting into a sort of bemused affection.

 

            “Can’t you go and cuddle up to your husband?” Stephen said, tone totally failing to mask the fact that he, too, had put an arm around Cara’s shoulders.

 

            “He’s setting things on fire,” Cara repeated in her most reasonable voice, the one she used on people who were snotty and rude to her. “You aren’t busy.”

 

            “You just wait until Ditzy finds something for me to do.”

 

            Claire caught up to Ditzy at the car and was rewarded with a small, warm smile. “All okay?” she said, reciprocating the smile.

 

            “Yeah, fine.” Ditzy reached out and tucked an errant curl firmly behind her ear. “Three separate people have now told me to loosen up.”

 

            “Oh yeah?” Claire grinned at him. “D’you think that means you should?”

 

            “I know I should. Easier said than done, yeah?” Ditzy brushed a butterfly-quick kiss over her cheek and unlocked the car. “Want to come and help me set up the fireworks?”

 

            “Don’t you want the lads to help you with that?” Claire pulled out the overnight bag she had put together and a sleeping bag; about a year ago, Ditzy had declared his old sleeping bag to be deader than a parrot in a Monty Python sketch and had gone out and bought two that zipped together. Claire had been touched, but it hadn’t made her any keener on camping.

 

            “I want Darren on the barbecue, ’cause he’s good at making them go and nursing them – he just can’t _cook_ , that’s all. Rob’s with Darren because Darren spends most of his off hours with Cara or wishing he was with Cara, and they live on opposite sides of London anyway, so it’s nice for them to, you know.” Ditzy put his own rucksack on.  


            Claire reflected that, while Ditzy was probably the most emotionally literate of the men in the field right now, even he had limits, and finished his sentence for him. “Get a chance to spend time together as friends. Yes. And you need Davy there so Rob doesn’t burn himself.”

 

            “Pretty much.” Ditzy locked the car again, and they started back towards the tents. “Ryan’s promised to field the Major and Mrs Preston when they get here in ten minutes, Jon’s gone up to the pub to use the bog and alert the landlord to the fireworks, just to be nice, and I was planning on getting Stephen and Niall to join in.”

 

            Claire looked around. Sure enough, Cara was fiddling with a long, thin box while Stephen heaved several larger ones out of the back of his and Ryan’s car. Blade’s oversized feet could just about be seen sticking out of his tent. She crawled into her own tent, where Ditzy joined her, and they started the messy business of sorting the two sleeping bags into one coherent thing. In the end, Claire stuffed it into Ditzy’s arms and disclaimed all responsibility, at which point Ditzy laughed at her and fixed it in two seconds flat.

 

            “Wanker,” Claire said, unpacking the few things that she needed out of her bag – book with accompanying light, toothbrush and toothpaste, bottle of water, wet wipes and tissues – and neatly organising them.

 

            Ceremoniously, Ditzy fished a solar lamp and a neck pillow out of his rucksack and put the former next to her book before straightening out the double sleeping bag in a business-like fashion and placing the cushion where her head would rest later. “I’m a very thoughtful wanker, aren’t I?”

 

            “Fishing for compliments is what you are,” Claire said, unable and unwilling to disguise the affection and surprise in her voice, and wriggled over to kiss him.

 

            “Oi,” Cara said, sticking her head through the tent flaps so her disembodied, absurdly youthful head hovered a few inches above theirs. In the dim light filtering through the tent’s material, augmented by the solar lamp’s glow, she looked ghostly. “Are you two coming to do the fireworks or not?”

 

            “Tact,” Stephen Hart’s faintly pained voice murmured, somewhere close by.

 

            “Bugger tact,” said Blade’s expressionless voice, also somewhere close by.

 

            “Enchanting,” Claire said, and Ditzy added a few broadly-expressed suggestions much more loudly.

 

            Claire rolled her eyes and extricated herself from the tent. What she had not been able to see when only Cara’s head was visible was the fact that Cara had acquired a bunch of glowsticks from somewhere, and was now wearing several glowing necklaces and bracelets and a ton of unactivated glowsticks thrust through her belt. She pulled one of these out, snapped it with a casual twist of one wrist, and worked it into a circlet with a deft gesture and her tongue caught between her teeth in concentration, then stood on tiptoe to plonk it on top of Claire’s head, where it rested like a wonky neon green halo.

 

            “Some angel I’d make,” Claire said, and laughed. It was barely edging towards dusk, but already the light was taking on a warmer, more golden quality as the sun started to dip in the sky.

 

            Ditzy tweaked the halo slightly so it sat straight, and picked up one of the boxes resting at Stephen’s feet. Cara seemed to have abandoned the box of sparklers; when Claire looked for it, she found it in Davy’s custody, Davy sitting across Finn’s lap with her dark head resting against his shoulder, both of them talking to Kermit, who was sitting on his heels and poking the barbecue’s coals every now and again.

 

            “That’ll be ready in ten minutes,” Ditzy remarked, also watching the barbecue.

 

            “Good,” Cara said. “Then we might get to eat before we get drunk, not after.”

 

            “I told you not to finish that cider,” Stephen said, giving Cara his funny warm quirk of a smile. Hard work he might be, Claire thought, but once he relaxed he was a sweetheart.

 

            “I can’t carry a bottle of cider _and_ do fireworks,” Cara said reasonably. She was slightly flushed, grey eyes bright, but steady on her feet. Claire mentally marked the location of the nearest bottle of water.

 

            “Mm,” Ditzy said dryly, and then: “Niall, put your bloody phone away and pick up a box, will you? How are you even getting signal here?”

 

            To Claire’s entertainment, Blade, who had been texting somebody, visibly started; she caught Cara and Stephen’s eyes, and Cara giggled and Stephen smirked very faintly and turned away. Claire looked at Blade and Ditzy and found wary looks on their faces: she grinned at them and picked up a box of fireworks, and Blade made a subterranean noise, slipped his phone into his pocket and picked up two, just to prove something. Ditzy tutted and took one away from him, and they headed for the softer ground towards the stream Ditzy had mentioned, a respectable distance from the cars and tents.


	6. Chapter 6

            Ditzy also had very fixed ideas about the location of the fireworks, but had clearly reacted to Ryan’s and Claire’s remarks about loosening up: instead of telling them what to do, he mooted his ideas and let people poke at them. In practice, since Stephen knew only a little about fireworks and explosives and Claire and Cara knew even less, this chiefly consisted of Blade and Ditzy batting points back and forth between them and then telling the other three what needed to be done. At several points, Blade fished out his phone and checked something with Lyle, who had met a friend in the pub’s bar and temporarily taken up residence there, and professed himself happy to settle occasional explosives-related questions provided they did not require him to leave his pint and return to the field. Eventually they were done, and the five of them returned to the campsite just in time to greet Lizzie, who had enveloped Davy in an enthusiastic hug and dropped a large pile of picnic blankets onto Finn. Major Preston was trying to park, and could be heard exchanging swearwords with Ryan as he wrestled his car into and out of an unexpected rut. Ditzy went to help Ryan, Blade went to rescue Finn, and Cara, Claire and Stephen joined Davy and Lizzie.

 

            “Darling! How are you?” Lizzie exclaimed, and Claire felt herself enveloped in a hug. She managed to say something satisfactory, and Lizzie descended on Davy instead, who handled it with remarkable aplomb. “Davy! How was the exercise?”

 

            “Hot and sticky,” Davy said, hugging Lizzie back. “How are you, Mrs Preston?”

 

            “Lizzie,” Lizzie said mock-sternly. “For the hundredth time, Lizzie. And yes, it is lovely weather, isn’t it?”

 

            “It’s really nice with the edge taken off the day,” Cara volunteered. “And it’s nice to wear summer clothes without a jacket to hand!”

 

            Cara was wearing the tiniest pair of shorts Claire had ever seen on an over-21 and some kind of floaty patterned blouse that looked like something Sienna Miller might wear. She looked unbelievably pretty, and the way Kermit’s eyes followed her around suggested that he’d noticed. Claire felt a brief moment of envy, and tugged at the hem of her own cotton t-shirt. It _was_ pleasantly warm out now, as opposed to baking, and the breeze was dying softly away with the dusk. Ditzy had chosen a nice day to engage in a crazy camping trip.

 

            Lizzie was talking energetically to Stephen. Claire heard the word ‘wedding’ and caught a laugh on the tip of her tongue; she glanced at Davy, whose blue eyes were glittering with suppressed laughter, and they both sniggered. Cara giggled.

 

            “I hate all three of you,” Stephen said feelingly when Lizzie had passed on to superintend the arrangement of the picnic rugs and make polite enquiries about the food. “Hello, Major Preston. Ryan, do you need a hand?”

 

            “Yes,” Ryan said from behind an immense pile of Tupperwares. Claire detected salad of both the fruit and the vegetable variety, as well as something that looked like couscous, and wondered if the boys would get hungry enough to eat it. She had originally discovered that Stephen was capable of animated conversation after accidentally getting him onto the subject of vegetarianism as an ecologically-friendly life choice, and Ditzy often became self-consciously healthy when confronted with vitamin C actually in front of him, but she suspected that the others would avoid vegetables like the plague.

 

            Stephen loped off towards the Prestons’ car. Claire followed him rather more slowly, and Cara and Davy ambled after them, Davy picking up in the middle of a funny story about a time somebody had fallen overboard and finishing it for Cara. Claire smiled, full of goodwill and unpronounceable Eastern European moonshine. High above, the sky started to lose its golden tint and the light turn to blue, and the moon waited in the wings.

 

            Claire heard the first burgers begin to sizzle on Kermit’s barbecue, and her mouth watered.

 

                       

            Half an hour later, the barbecue was in full swing. Everyone was sitting around the fire, laughing and talking, drinking and eating, and a second round of food – sausages, this time, and most of the inevitable jokes had already been made – was cooking on the grill above the redly glowing embers. It was eight o’clock, the sky still blue but less light, and Claire could still see everyone clearly. Cara was sitting with her head nestled into the broad flat curve of Kermit’s shoulder and her feet in Davy’s lap, while Davy was only upright because she was leaning against Finn, slouched comfortably with her baseball cap low over her face. Finn and Kermit were talking over both women’s heads, Kermit’s hand on his wife’s hip. Blade was talking to Lizzie, something about cooking that Claire had never expected Blade to be interested in but which apparently struck a chord with him, and occasionally his phone would buzz in his pocket and his hand would stray to it, automatically.  Lizzie noticed, and by the look on her face she teased him: Blade went blank-faced and mumbled, but Claire thought there was a tinge of pink to his ears again. That or it was the firelight’s flush, lighting on Major Preston’s short curly hair and sharp eyes as he talked to Ryan, glinting off his wedding ring and Lizzie’s as he laid his hand over hers, shining dully on Ryan’s ring and on Stephen’s as he talked to Lyle on the other side of the circle, turning Stephen to a creature of impossibly beautiful myth. Making Ditzy look like the easy-smiling laid-back golden boy he’d always been to his family, as well as the more complicated man Claire loved.

 

            Ditzy sat back from where he’d been turning over what looked like the yearly output of a medium-sized pig farm and leant over to kiss her cheek. His face was flushed bright red from the heat coming off the barbecue’s raked coals and the fire licking at its edges, the skin hot against Claire’s, but Claire leaned into the kiss anyway.

 

            “Not hungry?” Ditzy asked, nodding at her paper plate, which still had half a burger on it.

 

            “Just thinking,” Claire said.

 

            Ditzy touched her face with one delicate calloused hand, lightly dusted with charcoal, minor burns, and an old pale scar. “I should’ve dragged you to bed last night.”

 

            “I would have stabbed you to death with my marking pen,” Claire said, turning her face to kiss the clammy centre of his palm, marked with red and white pressure lines by the tongs. She knew she had charcoal smudges on her cheeks now. “All I was doing was ticking, correcting accents, and writing ‘in the exam, read the fucking question’ next to essays.”

 

            “Are you allowed to do that?”

 

            Claire leaned her head against his shoulder and closed her eyes. “I am if I just write RTFQ.”

 

            Ditzy chuckled softly, and Claire felt a tap on her shoulder. She sat up and looked up and found Davy leaning down to her with a can of Red Bull procured from God alone knew where.

 

            “Bless you, my child,” Claire said, cracked the can open and took a gulp.

 

            “I got your Facebook messages from half-past one,” Davy said. “Cara says she has Pro Plus in her glovebox if you want it.”

 

            “Do I need to lecture you about the dangers of caffeine pills?” Ditzy said severely, but Claire saw the grateful nod he gave Davy before he leaned forward to poke a sausage into submission.

 

             Davy snorted. “I dare you to say that to Cara. Go on, I dare you.”

 

            “All right,” Ditzy said, and made as if to get up.

 

            Claire sat on him. “She has a baby, you stupid bugger. Sleep is something that happens to other people.”

 

            Ditzy made an ambiguous noise through a mouthful of burger.

 

            “Gross,” Claire said, and Davy snorted and went away. “When are we doing fireworks?”

 

            “When it gets dark enough to be worth it,” Ditzy said, swallowing the burger. “Half-ten, maybe.”

 

            “Feeling less freaked out?”

 

            Ditzy gave her his warmest smile, and gestured at the circle of people with a twitch of the barbecue tongs. “Look. Happy people. That’s what I was after.”

 

            She shifted her seat so that she was no longer sitting on one of his thighs and gave him a pointed look. “That’s not what I was talking about.”

 

            “It’s like a snowball rolling down a mountain,” Ditzy said, making no fucking sense whatsoever. “You have to make the snowball, get it going. But then it gets some momentum, and it’s a bigger snowball, and you don’t have to add bits and push it out of the way of rocks any more, it just goes. And then suddenly it’s an avalanche devastating forests, and nothing’s going to stop it. You don’t have to worry about it any more.”

 

            “That’s really cheerful,” Claire said dryly, but she thought she took his point.

 

            He set the tongs and his plate down, put an arm around her shoulders, drew her in and kissed her slowly. There was a lot of whistling and laughing. Finn yelled something indistinct and undoubtedly obscene, and Davy’s open palm connected with the back of his head with a smack.

 

            “Get in, Ditzy!” Lyle shouted.

 

            Claire raised her middle finger in his general direction, and gathered from the laughter that Ditzy had done exactly the same thing at the same time. They broke apart, and Ditzy busied himself with the barbecue. Claire’s eyes met Stephen’s across the circle, and he smirked at her and mouthed ‘Aww’. She wrinkled her nose at him, but she smiled, too.

 

            _Happy people_ , Ditzy had said. He had a point.

 

 

            The first firework went off with a scream of chemicals and a burst of stardust, golden and violet against the navy blue sky, and everyone cheered – some more ironically than others. There was a distant laugh, and the two shadowy figures further down the slope moved confidently in the darkness; Lizzie squinted and saw the moment when the next two fuses lit, bursts of orange flame, and the figures skipped rapidly out of the way.

 

            “They’re not going to set themselves on fire, are they?” she murmured.

 

            Graham’s arms around her tightened. “Probably not,” he said quietly into her ear, his voice a deep, comforting rumble.

 

            She leaned back against his shoulder – a difficult enterprise, given that they were nearly the same height and she risked sticking her feet into the hot coals if she slid down any further. They didn’t usually indulge in significant displays of affection at these things, chiefly because neither of them was twenty-six and infatuated any more, but it was dark and no-one was watching. It was also slightly chilly, now that the sun had gone down, and Graham was always warm.

 

            At least, that was Lizzie’s excuse, and she was sticking to it. Glancing around the circle, she saw that everyone else had split into neat pairs as well: Stephen and Ryan one inseparable shadow, Claire lounging against Ditzy’s side, Ditzy’s cheek resting on her blonde curls. Lizzie could just about pick out Davy by the dying glow of the barbecue – by the look of her profile, she was eating cake – but couldn’t see Finn at all; then Davy set aside her paper plate and the light flickered slightly, and Lizzie realised that Finn was lying with his head in her lap. Predictably enough, Cara was sitting on Kermit’s lap, gasping as the second and third fireworks went off, smoky red showers of light shaped like carnations, rapidly followed by a swearword and a fizzing, spitting Catherine wheel. Lyle’s face was momentarily lit up, his hand in his mouth as he watched the fireworks with calculation in his eye then turned away to say something inaudible to an invisible Blade and vanished into the evening. More bursts of marigold appeared, and one flower shape after another launched up into the darkness and melted into points of light, blue, green, silver…

 

            “Ooh,” Lizzie said involuntarily.

 

             Graham laughed, almost soundless, and bent his head to her ear.

 

            “No, there was never any way I was going to leave before the fireworks,” Lizzie remarked, anticipating a smart-arsey comment on the subject. Her hand searched for and found Graham’s in the darkness, her long, narrow fingers curling around his. The metal of his ring was smooth and cold against her hand, warm where it had been tucked between her arm and her torso.

 

            “I was going to say,” Graham said, in his stealthiest whisper – which was significantly stealthier than Lizzie usually gave him credit for – “I think I know why Richards and Lyle got stuck with the fireworks.”

 

            Claire’s head turned; she’d heard them. Another loud bang, and the woody smell of smoke, assaulted everyone’s senses; one of the firework-setters laughed in its wake and they moved again, stagehands at a play where the backdrop was the whole night sky.

 

            “Mm,” Lizzie said, amused. Little teardrops of violet light were sizzling around the sky like phosphorescent tadpoles, and surely they must be getting near the end of the fireworks now? “Keep up, darling.”

 

            Graham snorted.

 

            “And don’t snort into my hair. Bloody man.”

 

            A shape moved in the darkness, this one tall and lanky, and Lizzie registered that Stephen Hart had got up and loped purposefully off to his car; after a couple of minutes he came back with a box of sparklers Lizzie could have sworn she’d seen Cara messing with, and possibly Ryan had confiscated on the grounds that Cara was more than capable of lighting them up one after another to use as photography effects. He stooped over Lizzie, and pressed a pair of sparklers and a lighter into her hands: she thanked him, and he grinned in the darkness, acknowledged her thanks softly, and made the rounds of the circles, passing out sparklers.

 

            Several fuses lit at once, Blade was briefly visible sprinting out of the way of a cluster of fireworks, and there was an almighty bang. The air filled with a rain of sparkling light, red and blue drops of fire bursting into golden coins and falling to earth, brightly-coloured stars against a velvet background. Cheers and whoops rang out, and Lizzie dropped the sparklers and lighter and sat up so she could applaud properly. Graham whistled loudly, nearly deafening her.

 

            “Must you,” Lizzie said affectionately.

 

            “Give me those sparklers,” Graham said, extending an imperative paw, and she handed them to him, along with the lighter; he lit one with a quick, confident flick of his thumb on the lighter’s mechanism, the sparkler bursting into crackling electric life in half a second, and passed it to her. Lyle and Blade had come back to the centre of the campsite, Blade slinking back into the circle like a moderately smug panther and looking astonished to receive a compliment from Davy on the fireworks, while Lyle bowed extravagantly as if he expected roses to be flung at his feet and got a balled-up paper napkin thrown at him by Ryan. All around the circle, sparklers were lighting up, bright white and sizzling. Kermit, his soft-edged face open and warm with affection, was drawing a halo around Cara’s head and laughing: she’d pulled a camera out and taken a picture, laughing back, and was now lighting her sparkler off Finn’s.

 

            “Thank you, love.” Lizzie drew a spiral in the air with her own, and then wrote her name, and her husband’s, and then her niece’s; _Cecilia_ had letters with pretty curves, satisfying to write in light, and she was close to the top of Lizzie’s mind right now. Lizzie’s mind drifted to the horse trials the next day, to the events Cecy was supposed to be taking on and the timings and the picnic packed up on her kitchen table.

 

            Graham lit his sparkler, and sketched stars in the air, grinning. Lizzie glanced sideways again, and found that Ditzy and Lyle were fencing with their sparklers, and Claire had given up on Ditzy and was tentatively moving towards Graham and Lizzie, picking her way carefully among empty boxes of food and Tupperwares.

 

            “Come and sit here,” Lizzie called, straightening a bit of rumpled blanket for Claire’s benefit.

 

            Claire made the last few steps over and sat down with a bump on the straightened blanket. Her sparkler had gone out, but she’d absconded with an entire box of them, and offered them to Lizzie and Graham with a conspiratorial grin.

 

            “We’re all perfect children,” Lizzie smiled, taking two in her free hand as her first sparkler fizzed out. She put the dead one in the lid of the sparkler box and lit a new one off Graham’s just as it spluttered to a stop, passing him a new, live one as soon as the first died.

 

            Graham kissed her cheek and went back to drawing stars. “Thanks for the sparklers, Claire.”

 

            Claire smiled. “No problem. Cara has the other box – I honestly don’t think anyone’s ever going to get it away from her.”

 

            “Two boxes? Do you think you’ll get through all of them?” Lizzie wrote in the air again, names and initials, words of fire leaving fluorescent trails, and saw Claire’s bottle-green eyes try to follow the words. _Lizzie Graham Cecy. LGC. LG. Lizzie, Graham._

 

            “Writing makes things real,” Claire murmured, and then blinked and shook herself. “Sorry – I let Jon give me a drink out of his hipflask, and I don’t know what he had in it, but – Yes, we’ll definitely get through both boxes. To be honest, Lizzie, I’ll be surprised if we get to bed before dawn.”

 

            “You won’t,” Graham said, with a sort of slightly wry confidence.

 

            Claire laughed, bright and free.

 

            “We should probably head off soon,” Lizzie said regretfully; turned her head and caught Graham’s eye, read his thinking off the quirk of his lower lip, the tilt of his eyebrows. “But not for a little bit.”

 

            Claire looked at both of them like she was reading a chapter in a book, and smiled.

 

 

            Kermit was interrupted in an in-depth discussion of Spurs’ current form by his wife climbing off his lap and unintentionally elbowing him in the face in the process.

 

            “Ow, fuck, what?” he said, and discovered on looking round that Cara had gone to say goodbye to Lizzie; she, Claire, Davy and Stephen were standing in a loose knot, chatting animatedly about something. It did not escape Kermit’s attention that Blade was eyeing them with apprehension.

 

            Blade noticed Kermit’s gaze and scowled. “What?”

 

            “Nothing,” Kermit said, preferring discretion and another beer to valour and a knife between the ribs. Major Preston, who was off to one side talking quietly to Ryan, Ditzy and Lyle, raised a hand in farewell, and various good-byes were called back at him.

 

            In the wake of their absence – carefully managed by Ditzy, since it was now dark enough to make running into one of the tents a real risk – the circle of people sitting around the former barbecue shrank. Ditzy disposed of the grill, scraped the remaining ashes and coals together, and added more fuel, before re-lighting it so that it flamed brighter than ever. Davy produced a box of doughnuts and a second chocolate sheet cake from the boot of somebody’s car, Claire got out a couple of bottles of cava, various people passed round cans of beer and plastic glasses, and everyone settled back into conversation with their friends, except for Lyle, who was vigorously defending the virtue of his hip-flask to anyone who cared to listen. Nobody did, so Stephen handed him a beer and Ryan patted him on the head, eliciting a foul oath and a tussle that nearly tipped both of them into the fire.

 

            Ditzy bawled a reprimand and Davy looked judgemental. Claire merely sighed, Blade looked impassive, Finn had just tripped over a guy-rope and was face-flat on the grass so hadn’t noticed, and Cara climbed back into Kermit’s lap and snuggled close against him.

 

            “Idiots,” she said affectionately, tucking her head under his chin. She’d clearly gone to get a jumper after saying goodbye to Lizzie – it was getting chillier, Kermit realised – because she was now wearing his hoodie.

 

            “That’s mine,” he observed, pulling its hood over her head. It came down to her nose, so that when she giggled at him all that was visible was her wide smile. It occurred to him that, given the length of her shorts, if she stood up and tugged the hoodie down it would look as if she was wearing nothing else.

 

            “Mine now,” Cara said with satisfaction, drinking her cava with as much ladylike elegance as was compatible with being sat in a field in the middle of nowhere wearing an oversized hoodie and molesting one’s husband, not to mention the flimsy plastic tumbler she was drinking it out of.

 

            “Oi, people’ll notice,” Kermit muttered, less in response to her actual words than to the actions of her free hand, which was wandering to some purpose. An empty beer can flew out of nowhere, and he yelled “Oi!” much more loudly and caught it in midair.

 

            Cara squeaked and slopped cava onto his leg. It was cold and it fizzed oddly on his skin, and he glowered at Blade.

 

            “You could’ve hit Cara!”

 

            Blade looked so affronted at this slur on his aim, everyone had to laugh, including Cara. Kermit grinned reluctantly and lobbed the beer can back at Blade, who caught it without apparently moving his head or tracking its flight with his eyes, just to make a point.

 

            “Show-off,” Davy groaned, folding the world’s most elaborate origami boat out of a paper napkin. “Ow, Claire!”

 

            “Stop moving,” Claire said, unrepentant. For reasons best known to herself, she had started pulling Davy’s black hair into an immaculate French plait.

 

            “I didn’t say I wanted you to braid my hair,” Davy complained.

 

            “You said you were bored of it.”

 

            “I meant I might cut it off! _Ow_ , fuck’s sake.”

 

            “I thought you lot were supposed to be tough!” Lyle called across the fire, eliciting a chorus of mocking laughter.

 

            Davy flipped him off. “So Claire can braid your hair next?”

 

            “I have some little glittery clips I use on Beth,” Cara suggested mock-solemnly, a sprite in soft-washed cotton leaning forward out of Kermit’s lap. “Purple. They’d bring out your eyes!”

 

            “How about pink?” Stephen asked, smirking faintly. “Pink is his colour.”

 

            The girls – well, the girls and Stephen – evidently had some kind of in-joke about Lyle and pink, because all of them burst out laughing, and Claire dropped two of the strands of the plait and swore through her chuckles. Cara sneezed, having got cava bubbles up her nose while laughing, and almost overbalanced out of Kermit’s lap.

 

            Kermit wrapped his arms around her waist and pulled her back against his chest; she spilled her cava again, startled, and Finn, who was getting quite sensible under Davy’s influence  - or at least acting like it about half of the time - passed her the open bottle. Kermit reached around and poured her a second glass in apology, then handed the bottle back to Finn and settled his arms more cautiously around Cara. She made a small, soft noise and leaned back against him, and his hand slid under her top, tracing the silvery lines on her stomach. She had never gained as much weight as she was supposed to, Beth had been a small baby, and breastfeeding had helped Cara lose kilos until she’d decided she’d had enough of bleeding, cracked nipples and gone on to formula. But although she was now nearly as slight as she had been before Beth, she still had stretchmarks, and Kermit knew they annoyed her. The slight snort of irritation she gave as his thumb brushed over one and the way she buried her nose in her glass told him so.

 

            “-this is our season,” Ditzy was saying belligerently as Kermit tuned back into the heated conversation about football that had bubbled under for a bit and was now in full flow again, courtesy of Ditzy haranguing a patient Finn about Kidderminster Harriers.

 

            “You said that last year, Ditz,” Finn pointed out, which did not stem the flow of Ditzy’s monologue at all.

 

            “Face it,” Kermit said, grinning at the long-suffering look on Finn’s face. “Kiddy are a bit shit.”

 

            This brought about a minor explosion of sputtering, uncomprehending frustration, and Kermit saw a grin flash across Ryan’s face. Cara sighed faintly and twisted in his arms, moving so that she had her back to Ditzy and her ear and cheek pressed against Kermit’s chest, able to watch Davy pulling faces and Claire constructing a perfect braid and ignore Ditzy’s rhetoric.

 

            “They should hire you to do their PR, mate,” Kermit said, stoking the fire.

 

            “They should hire me to sort their sodding _strategy_!” Ditzy said.

 

            “Don’t know that sods have got anything to do with it…”

 

            “What happens in the changing room stays in the changing room,” Finn agreed, straight-faced, which was hilarious, since Finn was possibly even straighter than Kermit himself and hadn’t been involved in the minor incident he was alluding to – that had been Carter and Anders, who thought they were subtle and absolutely weren’t. More to the point, it had been Connor Temple, who tended to think aloud, could be a little slow on the uptake where dinosaurs, computers and Star Wars weren’t concerned, and had an unfortunately carrying voice.

 

            “Conditioner,” Blade said, deadpan, and everyone collapsed with laughter except for the women, who looked moderately confused and more than moderately suspicious, before correctly divining that it was both an unimportant and a very childish joke.

 

            “Ugh,” Cara said, holding her cava glass well away from herself. “You’re putting this hoodie through the wash, it’s going to stink of cava.”

 

            “You’re going to stink of cava,” Kermit said, for want of a better retort, and was not surprised when she slipped out of his lap and went to sit by Claire and Davy. Davy had now escaped Claire’s clutches, and Cara took her place sitting in front of Claire, the difference being that Cara actually liked it when people played with her hair. She was now sitting comfortably with her head tilted back and a kittenish look of total comfort on her face as Claire combed gently through her long hair with her fingers before separating it into strands for a plait.

 

            Kermit had never known Claire with long hair, and quite possibly would not have recognised her if he’d seen her in the street without her characteristic short curly cut. But he remembered, a while ago when he’d just joined the Regiment and was still going in fear of Ditzy, that Lyle used to tease Ditzy about the blonde girl he was too scared to ask out properly, and he’d caught a glimpse of that blonde girl’s picture once: long, tumbling waves of fair hair, curling heavily at the ends. It was recognisably Claire, just – not really. The photograph would be several years old, now. So maybe Claire’s obsessive braiding was inspired by a desire to stay in practice, or maybe she just liked the feel of long hair without wanting it attached to her head. Kermit realised that he’d been staring at the shine of his wife’s caramel hair in the firelight and the soft smile on her face for several minutes now, knew himself to be totally whipped, and turned hastily back to the football conversation. Happily, since most of the others were well on to obliquely teasing Blade about his cat-on-hot-bricks behaviour with regard to Miss Wickes, his temporary enthrallment hadn’t been noticed.

 

            The party lasted until well past midnight, when people’s body clocks started to remind them just how many hours they’d been awake for when they didn’t need to be, and they drifted away from the dying fire. Davy and Finn, Claire and Ditzy slipped away in pairs, and Stephen disappeared between one conversational topical and the next. Even Blade went off to sleep (for which read ‘text Miss Wickes and obsess over her quietly’, Kermit thought), well before Lyle, and the circle of people around the fire contracted again. Then Cara was yawning against him, soft and pliant, and Kermit didn’t need to be told it was time they slept, he just made their excuses and their goodnights, scooped her up, and went. Wolf-whistles followed them.

 

            “Hell yes,” Cara sighed, mouth curling into a wicked sleepy curve, and they fell straight into sleep without looking back.


	7. Chapter 7

 

            Lyle slept like a log, so he didn’t wake when Blade stirred and roused in the middle of the night and realised he needed a piss. He was, however, sprawled over a great deal of the tent – Blade had woken to find himself lying on his side in a tense, narrow line. Blade kicked and pushed Lyle until he budged, mumbling sulkily but not waking, and Blade had enough space to crawl out of the tent.

             

            It was very dark outside, the low, thin sickle of moon affording little light. The sky and the glowing numerals on Blade’s watch told him it was just after two in the morning – so he’d only had an hour or so’s sleep, excellent – and he sighed, ran a hand over his short black hair, and knelt back down to fish his torch out of a pocket of his backpack and strap a knife to his wrist, more out of habit than anything else. Lyle tried quite hard to kick him in the face, and Blade shifted well out of the way. He found the torch, though, and flicked it on, lighting his way through the silent campsite and down into the woods. The other tents were dark and largely silent; any rustling was carefully stifled and half-hidden by the whisper of leaves in the breeze. Blade wondered if Lorraine liked camping; he hadn’t dared to ask her, suspecting she would be too shy to come, and failing to admit to himself that he was too shy to ask in the first place.

 

            He made his way through the scorched grass of the firework graveyard, climbed over a half-overgrown stile in the fence that separated field from wood, and headed into the trees. The patch of wood was small, but thickly forested, with a good deal of bushes and brambles that danced in the shadows like live things. Blade could hear the brook and the trees, and he saw an owl swoop and flit into its nest; as a courtesy, he kept the beam of his torch low. After a few moments, he stopped, selected a tree, and relieved the pressure on his bladder.

 

            As he was tucking himself back in, he spotted a ghostly, moonlit glow just the other side of a particularly thick stack of bramble and a couple of the heftiest trees, and froze abruptly. He wouldn’t have seen whatever it was from the loose path he’d followed; he had had to step off the path just to find the tree he needed, and from the path’s angle, it was shielded from view. Someone coming the other way, however, might well catch a glimpse of it. Whatever it was.

 

            Blade was not in the habit of talking to himself, so he did not say aloud ‘please don’t be an anomaly’, but he was certainly thinking it pretty loudly. All the hairs had risen on the back of his neck, and a whisper of unease was dancing needle-like along his shoulders and spine. He swapped the torch to his other hand and drew his knife, then edged around the bramble, every sense alert.

 

            “ _Shit_ ,” Blade hissed out loud, and the glass shards of an anomaly spun serenely in the midnight air.

 

            He was much faster back to the campsite, not bothering with silence or with not flashing his torch about, and he dove straight back into his tent. “Lyle, wake up, there’s an anomaly in the wood!”

 

            Lyle sat bolt upright, fast asleep to wide awake in about two seconds. “You’re fucking kidding me!”

 

            “I’m not! Go and look if you like. It’s not visible from this side, but –”

 

            “Tracks? Did anything come through?” Lyle rubbed his eyes and yanked a shirt on, hazel eyes sharp and bright, craggy face heavily marked with shock and lack of sleep.

 

            Blade hesitated. “I didn’t see anything big or out of the ordinary. It was just spinning there. Fucking _Christ_.”

 

            Lyle pulled his jeans on, then took his phone out of the back pocket. “Go and wake the others, I’ll call the ARC.” He nodded at the knife Blade was still carrying. “Got any more of those?”

 

            Blade turned out the pockets of his rucksack and produced two more knives and the straps needed to secure one; Lyle took one and Blade strapped the other to his other wrist. “Your thumbs…?” He was matter-of-fact about Lyle’s chronic case of peril-related eczema – he’d had a great deal of practise - but there was no denying that Lyle’s thumbs reminded him of his grandmother’s little ways, and he found both of them a little uncanny. But useful, in Lyle’s case.

 

            “Not a thing,” Lyle said, holding his phone to his ear. “Let’s hope it keeps up.”

 

            Blade slid back out of the tent and made for the one he’d seen Ryan go into. “Boss,” he said quietly, crouching down by its entrance. “Hart, wake up, we’ve got a problem.”

 

            There was a single moment’s silence, and then the mouth of the tent was being unzipped and Ryan stuck his head out, mostly naked and entirely annoyed. “Blade, this’d better be good.”

 

            “There’s an open anomaly in the wood. I couldn’t see anything big coming out of it. Lyle’s ringing the ARC.”

 

            “Fuck,” Ryan said succinctly, and Stephen echoed him sleepily. “Get everyone up and into the middle of the camp, have Ditzy light the fire again if there’s enough left. Stephen and I will go and have a look.”

 

            Blade nodded and stood again, heading for the next tent – Claire and Ditzy’s. “Ditz,” he said, a bit more loudly.

 

            “Augh,” Ditzy said clearly, and there was a lot of rustling before he appeared. “Niall, what the fuck.”

 

            Blade considered the likelihood of Claire’s waking and came firmly down the side of ‘not yet’. “Anomaly in the wood. The boss says get up, everyone into the middle of the camp, re-light the fire. Lyle’s calling the ARC but fuck knows how long they’ll take to get here.”

 

            “Anything come through?” Ditzy was dressing quickly.

 

            “Not that I saw. Hart and Ryan have gone to have a look.” Blade got up and went to the next tent, where he was greeted by Davy, looking profoundly irritated and even more curious. Fortunately, she was mostly dressed.

 

            “What the fuck’s going on?” she demanded. Blade could hear and glimpse Finn dressing in the tent behind her, scrambling into his t-shirt, and saw her eyes flash to the knife strapped to his wrist.

 

            “I can’t tell you,” he said. “But it’s not good. Get dressed and get out here. Finn, go and help Ditz.”

 

            “I’m coming, I’m coming,” Finn muttered, and Davy disappeared back into the tent just as Finn scrambled out again.

 

            “I’m not fucking getting up,” Claire said crossly, audible despite the distance between the two tents. “It’s two in the sodding morning, Dave, think again.”

 

            “No,” Ditzy said flatly. “This is _important_ , Claire, come on, get dressed.”

 

            Davy slipped out of the tent, now dressed and wearing a shining head-torch. “Is it?” she said.

 

            “Yeah,” Finn said, obviously without having the slightest notion what it was.

 

            “Balls,” Davy said comprehensively, and stalked off towards Claire’s tent.

 

            Finn and Blade shared a look.

 

            “Bagsy I don’t wake Cara and Kermit,” Finn said.

 

            “They won’t be shagging,” Blade scoffed.

 

            Finn gave him a bleak look that told Blade far too much about exactly why Davy had been awake to hear him waking Ditzy and the others, and Blade snorted, shook his head and went to get Kermit and wake Cara up. Cara, who was clearly in the habit of waking at horrible hours in the night, stumbled relatively quickly into her clothes and allowed Kermit to hoist her to her feet. Kermit cast her an assessing look, and then bent to grab a blanket they’d had draped over the two of them and wrap it around her shoulders; Cara wobbled, and Blade steadied her. Lights were going on all over the darkened camp, and Davy was towing a fully-dressed and highly irritable Claire out of her tent and towards a nest of blankets and sleeping bags she’d constructed by the fire Ditzy had raked into a smaller, more practical size and coaxed into lighting. Cara wobbled off in their general direction and collapsed into Claire’s lap. Blade noted that Davy didn’t look nearly so groggy, and also that a selection of sharp kitchen knives had been collected and marshalled neatly off to one side.

 

            For the first time, Blade suspected that possibly, in the future, provided they stopped snarling at each other at some point, he and Davy might get on OK.

 

            In the flickering firelight Blade could see Ryan and Stephen trudging back up the hill. They weren’t moving too fast, so it probably wasn’t anything too bad, and neither of them was visibly injured, so they hadn’t come a cropper on any unwanted visitors from the past. However, neither of them looked particularly pleased, either – so it hadn’t conveniently vanished. Ryan gestured, and Blade and the other lads joined them just beyond the campsite, standing in a tight knot where the women couldn’t hear them.

 

            “It’s still open, and I think something’s come through,” Stephen said without preliminaries. “But nothing big – to be honest with you, it looks like a medium-sized dog.”

 

            Lyle, tucking his phone back into his pocket, frowned. “So Lassie’s got lost…?”

 

            “I stuck my head through the anomaly,” Stephen said. Ryan’s face solidified in a way that suggested serious disapproval. “It’s still a forest, but you can just about see a hunting camp. What do you want to bet they have dogs?”      

 

            “Fuck,” Lyle said, running a hand through his hair and making it stick up. “Time period?”

 

            “I don’t do humans,” Stephen said, jamming his hands into his pockets. “I would say Mesolithic or earlier, but that’s a guess. It could be anywhere late Pleistocene, and I wouldn’t bank on the people on the other side being modern humans. We need an archaeologist.”

 

            “We haven’t got an archaeologist,” Ryan said, with a clear intonation of ‘and we’ll just have to live with it, Hart’. “What did the ARC say?”

 

            “The ADD clocked the anomaly nearly two hours ago,” Lyle told them. “They’re an hour away.”

 

            Stephen pressed his lips together and flicked a sideways glance at Ryan, who gave him a steady look, then tilted his head very slightly; Stephen stared into the middle distance, shifted his stance, then shrugged with one shoulder and let his head waver, side to side, as if he was saying something could go either way. He met Ryan’s eyes without apparent concern, and his posture was still relaxed. Ryan’s eyes narrowed, and he took a deep breath and opened his mouth to give orders.

 

            “For fuck’s sake,” Lyle said, speaking for everyone present. “Just get hitched and put us out of our misery.”

 

            Stephen looked vaguely strangled.

 

            “Shut up, Jon,” Ryan said. “Right. Ditzy, Kermit, I want you two on the anomaly. Take your phones, I want to hear from you every ten minutes, the second anything comes through, or if it shuts. Finn, Blade, Lyle, stay up here. Same applies. Stephen and I will go and see if we can find this bloody dog. We’ll be back in half an hour. If we’re not, alert the ARC and don’t come looking for us. Ditzy, Kermit, if that happens you get back up to the fire.”

 

            Blade nodded, as did the others; there were a couple of muted murmurs of ‘yes, boss’. Ryan looked at Blade a little pointedly, and Blade, who had been expecting this, handed over one of his knives. It didn’t bother him too much; he still had one left and Ryan would take decent care of the one he’d given up.

 

            “Those who didn’t come armed,” Ryan added, “kitchen knives.”

 

            “I think Davy’s already got the lot,” Finn volunteered.

 

            “Fine, go and bother Davy for kitchen knives.” Ryan turned to Stephen. “Ready?”

 

            Stephen took the torch out of the sheath attached to his belt and flicked it on. “Let’s go.”

 

            Torches were turned back on, and the group split up, each splinter going its own way. Blade returned to the fire and the trio of grumpy women with Lyle and Finn; he didn’t think it was a coincidence that Kermit and Ditzy had been sent down to the anomaly. Claire was halfway to a fit of temper, torn between irritation and concern and semi-conscious due to lack of caffeine, and Cara, having woken up all the way, was bright-eyed with curiosity. Davy was the only one of the three who wasn’t clearly about to ask several awkward questions, and she parcelled out the kitchen knives with reasonable aplomb. Claire and Cara’s eyes went wide; then Claire’s mouth twisted sideways, she muttered something unrepeatable and full of Yorkshire, and she collapsed sideways in the nest of blankets and sleeping bags to rest her head on Cara’s lap. Blade carefully did not notice the way her breasts shifted under her loose pyjama top.

 

            “Aww,” Cara crooned, running her fingers through Claire’s dishevelled curls. “Poor baby.”

 

            “Fuck. Off,” Claire said, succinct and muffled. Davy put a pillow over her face, and she removed it, sat up again, and fixed Lyle with the patented teacher’s stare designed to reduce hulking seventeen-year-old boys to a state of pants-wetting terror. “Jon. Are we in physical danger?”

 

            Cara’s grey eyes rested unwaveringly on Kermit, who clearly knew when he was done for, because he collected weaponry for himself and Ditzy and vanished at speed into the night. Lyle met Claire’s gaze with level, slightly mocking hazel eyes, and Blade felt the tension in the air grow thick; he saw both Finn and Davy twitch and shift in response, spines straightening, eyes sharpening.

 

            “ _Probably_ not,” Lyle said.

 

            “Probably,” Claire repeated flatly, and her voice was the voice of the terrifying Maths teacher Blade had had when he was fifteen who had informed him that if he continued to waste his potential on long days on the moors and playing with knives when he ought to be studying, she would string him up from the church spire and set his miserable remains alight. (She had been his favourite teacher, and his Maths GCSE had been his best mark. He still felt a spark of extra tension when Claire’s tone shifted to sound like hers.)

 

            “Claire, sweetie,” Davy said, experimenting with making shadow animals on the wall of a nearby tent, “drop it, they’re not going to tell us anything.”

 

            Claire simmered quietly.

 

            “No, seriously,” Davy said. “Enigmatic fuckers.” She looked up and gave Finn a blinding grin.

 

            “Adrenaline junkie,” Claire muttered.

 

            “Yup!”

 

            “And suddenly I understand why you two are dating,” Lyle said to Finn, who gave him a particularly gormless grin in response. “Well, you’re not as bad as Hart and the boss.”

 

            Claire had curled up on her side again, head resting on Cara’s leg, snuggled up in a truly immense sleeping bag. Cara twirled one ash-blonde ringlet around her finger. “Oh, are they communicating by making eyes at each other again?”

 

            Lyle heaved a long-suffering sigh. “They have whole conversations by means of eye-fucking. Be grateful you don’t have to work with them.”

 

            “I think they’re sweet,” Claire said rebelliously.

 

            “We all think they’re sweet,” Davy said, testing the various kitchen knives for balance. She was positively chirpy at battle stations, apparently. This must be why she and Finn liked each other so much.

 

            Blade imagined how Lorraine, who flinched at flickering lightbulbs, would react to this. He winced internally, and wondered if he’d get away with bringing her gun, and if it would make her feel better the same way knives made him feel better – or if it would make her feel more prepared, the same way Davy seemed to be coping with the unexpected wake-up call.

 

            “Go for the carving knife,” Blade said, surprising himself and everyone else. “You want reach. And it’s sharp.”

 

            “You would know,” Davy said peaceably, and tested the edge with her thumb, drawing blood. “Ow. Shit.”

 

            “There’s a first aid kit in my tent,” the chrysalis of sleeping bag and demented curls currently masquerading as Claire announced, somewhat muffled because she had her face mashed into Cara’s thigh.

 

            Cara lifted Claire’s head and inserted a pillow between it and her leg, then wrapped her blanket more tightly around her own slender shoulders. Davy scrambled to her feet and went for the first aid kit; Cara wrapped a plaster around her thumb.

 

            “All we need now is for you to trip and fall flat in the fire,” Lyle said to Finn, who was at least three metres away with his back to the object in question, scanning the night. Blade stoked the fire, reminded of its usefulness, and turned away from it, closing his eyes and opening them wide, trying to get a little night acclimatisation. When he felt his eyes could cope sufficiently well with the darkness, he stepped out beyond the ring of tents and cars and walked slowly and silently around it, eyes searching for anything off, any movement, ears straining. He expected to hear one of the women ask what he was doing, or what was going on, but none of them responded to his departure.

 

            He neither saw nor heard anything untoward, but nor did he see Ryan and Stephen or Ditzy and Kermit returning – so the anomaly was still open. And a third of Ryan and Stephen’s time had gone. He swapped places with Finn, who went round again carrying a torch. Finn was good at picking out shapes and hints of movement nobody else would ever have picked up on, and if anything was lying concealed out there, he’d see it.

 

            Blade heard Lyle’s phone go off, and he checked it. “Nothing yet,” he said, carrying enough that both Blade and Finn would hear. “From either group.”

 

            “Go to sleep, Claire,” Blade heard Davy recommend.

 

            “I am asleep,” Claire mumbled crossly.

 

            “Are you -?” Cara said in apparent fascination.

 

            “Yes,” Davy said matter-of-factly. “You should, too.”  


            “What, with the knife?”

 

            “No, just in general.”

 

            Blade risked a glance over his shoulder. Davy had wrapped herself up in a blanket, her back pressed against Claire’s, with the palm of her right hand resting on the carving knife’s handle. Blade saw nothing especially odd about this, but recognised that other people probably would.

 

            Cara made a small ‘hm’ noise and flopped onto her side next to Claire, the pair of them curling tightly into one ball of human.

 

            Blade saw Finn coming by the torch’s light dancing on the grass, and seconds later Finn was standing next to him. Blade also saw the moment Finn caught sight of Davy, because it was marked by a very soppy expression flashing across his face. Blade’s response must have shown in his own face, because Finn rolled his eyes.

 

            “I don’t get why you two don’t get on,” he said very quietly.

 

            Blade shrugged. “We get along OK.”

 

            Finn rolled his eyes again, eloquent in disbelief. “Reckon this is going to be a bad one?” His eyes were still resting on Davy.

 

            Blade hedged his bets and kept it clean, just in case Davy, Claire or Cara had sharper hearing than they usually admitted to. “Lyle isn’t getting at his thumbs. And Hart seemed pretty calm.”

 

            “Huh,” Finn said. “How long till back-up gets here?”

 

            “Maybe forty minutes,” Blade said, and stared at the night sky.

 

 

            Ryan and Stephen got back twenty minutes later, just in time to stop Lyle calling the ARC and escalating matters to the point where Jenny Lewis had to pacify the local constabulary and disclaim all responsibility for any flattened wildlife. (Blade had once been privileged to hear her announce that badgers, as a species, should not be permitted to cross roads. Everyone had laughed except Adey, who was getting the cold shoulder from Abby Maitland on account of his inadequate driving.) The pair of them came up the hill at a brisk clip, but the moment they stepped into the light and Ryan caught Lyle’s eye it was immediately obvious that they hadn’t found anything.

 

            “Gone to ground,” Stephen said, with a careful eye for Claire, Cara and Davy. Davy had stirred at their approach, but Claire and Cara were out of it. A smirk tugged at a corner of his mouth, and he reached for his phone and took a surreptitious photo. “Bless. Are they asleep?”

 

            “If that goes on Facebook, I’ll kill you,” Davy mumbled, and the proto-smirk on Stephen’s face turned into a full-blown one. “No offence, Captain Ryan.”

 

            “None taken,” Ryan said, eyebrows twitching. “Any sign of back-up?”

 

            “The night shift are driving Stringer bonkers,” Lyle volunteered, referring to the small group of scientists who took on-call shifts more or less in turns with the main anomaly team, which minimised the amount of time Connor Temple spent fainting with exhaustion and maximised the amount of time that Cutter spent wrapped up in his research and out of everyone else’s hair.

 

            “Not difficult,” Ryan observed. “Is Dr. Williams playing I Spy again?”

 

            “Worse,” Lyle said. “She brought quiz cards and Temple.”

 

            “Oh god,” Stephen said, and fished out his phone, hopefully to deliver brotherly advice to Temple about not killing himself working or inducing his colleagues to murder him via sheer geeky chirpiness. Good lad, but he got carried away.

 

            “Stringer says he started entertaining thoughts of deliberately crashing the car just to bring an end to the Star Wars trivia somewhere around Newbury.” Lyle folded his arms.

 

            “If he managed to bump Temple off, Miss Maitland would kill him and resurrect him just so she could kill him again,” Ryan remarked, and then acquired a sceptical look. “Are they planning to come through here?”

 

            “No. Too many civilians.” They all eyed Davy, who was pretending to be fast asleep with gusto. “Also, there’s a road a couple of hundred metres down the way that takes you to a better access point. Allegedly.”

 

            “Don’t tell me Dr. Williams brought her Ordnance Survey map collection, too,” Ryan said. They all liked Dr. Williams’ habit of bringing sandwiches, thermoses of hot Ribena and coffee, and extraneous bars of chocolate to anomalies, and could appreciate the usefulness of the car games on a good day, but the map collection was beyond the pale. Especially as she could never close the damn things.

 

            “Ciarán lost them behind a filing cabinet,” Hart volunteered. He knew the night shift team better than anyone else present, since he was friends with Connor and Connor was friends with the night shift, and since things were always going to be awkward with Cutter, he preferred to socialise with the others and Abby and Connor in isolation.

 

            “Thank fuck,” Lyle said, and his phone buzzed again, as did Ryan’s. They both went for them immediately.

 

            Ryan’s breath hissed harshly through his teeth.

 

            “Oh, fuck,” Lyle said, and Cara stirred and Davy stopped pretending to be asleep.

           

            Blade peered over Lyle’s shoulder and stared at the text message on the phone’s screen.

 

            _Couple of kids came through. Not sure theyre human._

 

            “Hart, with me,” Ryan said. “Lyle, go and call this in. Finn, Blade, stay here.”

 

            Davy was now sitting upright, hair a bird’s nest, holding the carving knife in a loose grip. “Is it worth waking Claire and Cara?”

 

            “No. Stay put.” Ryan turned away and started walking down the gentle slope of the campsite at a brisk clip, and Stephen followed him into the darkness of the night. Blade saw the moment when Stephen’s headtorch went on, and beams of bobbing light marked the two men’s passage as they walked away, into the woods.

 

            “Well, this is creepy,” Davy remarked. Blade didn’t bother to answer, since she wasn’t talking to him. She twisted around in her seat so she was facing the other way and poked at the fire with more enthusiasm than skill.

 

            “Go back to sleep,” Finn said quietly.

 

            Davy gave him a look of moderate disbelief.

 

            Finn shrugged. “Worth a try,” he told her placatingly, and Blade slipped out into the darkness again, looking for a moving not-quite-human form, this time. If a couple of kids could find their way through, who else might have done?

 

            There was nothing there, not that he could see. That didn’t reassure him much.


	8. Chapter 8

            Stephen walked a little behind Ryan as they moved into the wood; he knew the mention of kids that might not be human had rattled Ryan a little, and had long ago arrived at a balance between tracking creatures without interference and accepting protection that stopped him being chewed on by a raptor or trodden on by a hadrosaur. It took seconds to reach the anomaly site at the pace they were going, and Stephen stepped out from behind Ryan’s broad shoulders to get a clearer view of the two individuals standing facing Ditzy and Kermit. A shiver went down his spine, and he tried not to let his jaw drop too obviously. Staring was a lost cause.

 

            At a guess, the pair were thirteen or fourteen, perhaps a little older. One, who Stephen thought was a girl, had slightly more defined features than the boy, which could be age or just the way she looked.  They were dressed almost identically, in loose garments stitched together from skins: uneven tunics with neat holes for the arms and head, belted at the waist with reddened strips of leather tied in a complex knot, and items of clothing that more or less resembled leggings. Both were barefoot and had long, less than tidy hair, the boy’s loose and reaching his shoulders, and the girl’s clubbed back with a rough tie, with one braid hanging by her face decorated with a long black feather, possibly a crow’s flight feather. The boy wore a necklace of what looked like very small shells. Both were somewhat muddy and carrying stone knives that, Stephen knew from bitter experience with an overenthusiastic archaeologist trying to replicate cutmarks on bones, would be wickedly sharp – but neither looked as if they’d tangled with Kermit and Ditzy, and both seemed relaxed, if wary. Stephen didn’t think they were brother and sister, although there was a noticeable similarity of expression, posture, and build; cousins, possibly? Both had caramel skin with waves of freckles over cheekbones and nose, and broad, strong faces with marked but soft-edged features. The girl had sharp light eyes and wavy dark hair. The boy’s hair was curlier and distinctly reddish in tone, and his eyes were darker and dreamier.

 

            “Ryan?” Stephen said quietly. “You know I said they could be anywhere up to Mesolithic? I take it back. Palaeolithic’s looking more likely.”

 

            “Which means fuck all, in the grand scheme of things,” Ryan said, unimpressed. “Ditzy.”

 

            Ditzy moved to his side and spoke softly. The boy’s eyes tracked their movements, and he reached out unobtrusively and tapped his companion’s arm; she gave no sign of having noticed. “They came through five minutes ago. They were surprised to see us, and a bit scared, a think. We had a bit of a stand-off, the girl tried to stab Darren, but then the boy grabbed her and said something and she backed off. It looked like an apology.”

 

            “So you gave her her knife back.”

 

            “Gesture of trust. Raised our hands to show we weren’t armed, as well.” Ditzy caught Stephen’s sceptical eye and grinned. “Didn’t say we were honest about it! She was a bit inept, anyway.”

 

            “They spoke?” Stephen asked, fascinated.

 

            Ditzy cast his eyes heavenwards, as if to say ‘ _scientists’_. “They made noises. I don’t speak caveman.”

 

            “Cutter’ll have a field day,” Ryan said gloomily. “Brace yourself, Ditzy.”

 

            “He doesn’t do hominids either,” Stephen said.

 

            “Like that’ll stop him.” Ryan stared at the pair of possible Neanderthals. “What’s a hominid?”

 

            “Not a human, but not a chimp, either.” Stephen frowned. “Why haven’t they run away?”

 

            “Dunno,” Ditzy said succinctly. “They keep trying to ask us something. The girl’s getting a bit annoyed.”

 

            Stephen had noticed that her posture was more pointed than the boy’s.

 

            “Any ideas?” Ryan said to everyone present, and then, suddenly, the girl threw her hands in the air and made a noise that bore an uncanny resemblance to a cross between a wolf’s yip and a dog’s bark.

 

            They all stared at her.

 

            “The only way this could be more surreal,” Ditzy said conversationally, “is if they’d run out of that sodding thing looking for their ball.”

 

            Stephen wavered over time period. “If they’ve got a dog, they can’t be Palaeolithic, can they?”

 

            “Hart, I’m pretty sure the dog’s a fact of life,” Ryan said. “Save the science for later.”

 

            Stephen rolled his eyes and dug in his pockets. “I know you hate these trousers, but –”

 

            “They’re _orange_.”

 

            “- they have pockets,” Stephen concluded triumphantly as he retrieved a bit of rough paper (folded-up paper copy of a memo from a meeting two months ago) and a stub of a pencil from one of the aforementioned pockets. “Here.” He flattened out the paper and leaned against a tree-trunk, drawing a rather wonky dog. He turned back to find both children staring owlishly at him, and the girl fingering her knife in a way that reminded him strongly of Blade and was causing Kermit, Ryan and Ditzy to give her matching fish-eyed glares. The boy tilted his head and whistled like a bird.

 

            Stephen, who was bored of being mocked by a pair of delinquent Palaeolithic teenagers, hooted like an owl back at him and had the satisfaction of seeing him jump and look startled. The girl laughed mercilessly – or at least she made a noise that strongly resembled a laugh and sounded ruthlessly teasing – and the boy rounded on her, scowling.

 

            Stephen coughed pointedly and held out the paper. They both crowded round it in an instant, causing Ryan, Kermit and Ditzy to twitch, and Ryan to reach for the knife that Blade had given him, but neither of them did anything malicious – they just stared and pointed at the picture of the dog and broke into excited jabbering mostly aimed at each other.

 

            Stephen jumped to some conclusions, and held the paper and pencil out to them. The boy took the paper in grubby hands and brought it up close to his face, staring at it; the girl took the pencil thoughtfully and toyed with it, testing both ends, trying to draw on her skin with it. Then she snatched the paper from the boy, who made a protesting noise heard in playgrounds all over the world, and drew a wobbly line on it.

 

            “Progress,” Ditzy muttered cynically, but they were all watching with bated breath – it was useless to pretend otherwise.

 

            The boy snatched the pencil and paper from the girl, who folded her arms and said something incomprehensible and uncomplimentary in tone, and hesitated, biting his lip, before choosing the same tree-trunk that Stephen had leant against and starting to draw, carefully but with a heavy hand and much accidental poking of the pencil through the paper. Eventually, he took the pencil away and showed the picture to his companion, who approved it with pursed lips and took it from him to show to Stephen, who she had evidently decided was in charge.

 

            The picture was skilfully accomplished, considering that neither child could be familiar with the materials. It showed a couple of circular structures with lots of oversized, simply-rendered people around them, and two smaller people a little distance away, a trail of dots leading from them to the group of structures and people. The trail of dots continued through a simplistic but clear image of an anomaly, and led, at last, to an image of a dog copied from Stephen’s drawing. The style reminded Stephen of cave paintings he’d come across, but the people more closely resembled southern African rock paintings than any European prehistoric art that he knew of.

 

            “So they’ve lost their dog and they’ve come looking for it?” Ryan interpreted, staring at the picture. “Well, we got that far. Nice to know, I suppose.” He frowned. “What’s worrying me is where the hell are their parents?”

 

            Stephen took the pencil back, pointed at the figures by the structures, and drew a clumsy line of dots to the anomaly, showing it to the children with his eyebrows raised.

 

            The girl shook her head confidently, and picked up something Stephen had not previously noticed: a basket of woven twigs, half-full of some sort of tubers, still coated in dirt. She tilted it forward to show it to them.

 

            “Skiving,” Kermit said, in tones of enlightenment. “Dress ’em in school uniform and you’d find them behind the bike sheds of any state school, yeah?”

 

            This was a dislocating thought. Stephen ignored it, and tried to work out ways of further communication. “Do we tell them we’ll look for their dog and send them back home?” He looked doubtfully at the anomaly, which was bright and steady. “And what do we do if they don’t want to go?”

 

            “I’d say ‘make them’,” Ryan said, with a twist of his mouth, “but if we shove them back through, they’ll bring their friends and relations down on us, and I’m not keen on defending myself from cavemen with a bunch of kitchen knives. Particularly not with Cara and Claire to worry about. And I don’t know how Davy handles herself in a fight.” He heaved a sigh and checked his watch. “The ARC should be here in twenty minutes. See if you can get the kids to go back through. If not, we wait for the ARC and keep them here.”

 

            Stephen leant against the same tree-trunk and racked his brains for a way of communicating. Finally, he drew four large stick figures on their side of the anomaly, next to the two smaller ones, and drew a third line of dots leading back into the anomaly and back to the camp and people depicted on the other side. To avoid any confusion, he added an arrow at the end of this, pointing towards the camp. Then he drew a fourth line of dots between the four large stick figures and the dog, with an arrow that pointed to the dog, and a fifth that brought stick figures and dog back through the anomaly, with accompanying arrow. He showed it to the kids, and traced the lines of dots with his finger to try to show them what he meant.

 

            The kids looked at each other, looked at him and then Kermit, Ryan and Ditzy, and then started talking to each other, clearly anxious but not confused. There was a lot of gesturing going on; Stephen wondered how much of it, if any, was sign language akin to the speech they used, which sounded similar to, but not quite like sing-song yet guttural human speech. Stephen had never heard vowels or consonants like some of the ones they used anywhere, and he was fairly well-travelled.

 

             Ryan muttered something about bloody sodding phone signal.

 

            “There’s a tree stump, boss,” Kermit said, not taking his eyes off the kids.

 

            The muttering transmuted into complaints about having to stand on a fucking tree stump  to get things done, but Ryan went and stood on the tree stump anyway, and texted away. Stephen waited to see what the kids would do.

 

            The boy approached him and held out his hand, and he put the paper and pencil into it. He drew another line of dots between the two figures representing him and his companion and the dog, and pointed at it with hope clear in his brown eyes. Stephen bit his lip and shook his head, then thought better of it, but evidently the boy understood; his shoulders slumped. The girl, who had been standing well back and pretending to be aloof and commanding, also looked distressed.

 

            “Oh God, I feel bad for them now,” Stephen said to Ryan.

 

            “You and your soft heart,” Ryan said, but he shot a glance at the kids that said he felt similarly.

 

            “We can’t have a pair of semi-Neanderthal kids wandering around Herefordshire looking for a lost dog,” Stephen said. “If it is a dog.”

 

            “What else could it be?” Ryan demanded.

 

            “Have you ever tried to tell the difference between a dog’s tracks and a wolf’s?” Stephen sighed and rubbed his hand over his mouth. “How far away are the ARC?”

 

            “Ten minutes.”

 

            “We wait,” Stephen said, and made a sharp, useless gesture. He wished he could just find the kids’ bloody pet for them and send them home; they were only children, and he could see they were uneasy. “I don’t see that we’ve got any other choice.”

           

 

            The night shift arrived exactly seven and a half minutes later, just as it was becoming apparent that dawn was closing in and the air took on that cool sharp edge of approaching day. They brought a yawning but excited Connor Temple, and a bright-eyed Dr Williams. Everyone else looked either professionally bored or half-asleep, which more or less covered how Stephen, Ryan, Kermit and Ditzy felt at this point.

 

            “Ahh, Neanderthals!” Connor said, with his overenthusiastic chipmunk grin. Stephen recognised, with a sinking feeling, the manic stage that Connor reached after a few days with too little sleep and too much caffeine. “This is _awesome_.”

 

            Stringer rolled his eyes. “Are they violent?”

 

            “No,” Ryan said. “Just feeling blue. They want their dog.”

 

            “How can you tell?” Dr Williams demanded, her heart-shaped face lively with interest. Stephen passed her the much scribbled-on paper, and she seized it. “Oh, wow. Nice work. Can I keep this?”

 

            “You’ll want a pencil,” Stephen said.

 

            “I’ve got about six. Oh, and that reminds me.” She pulled a packet of something from her pocket and cracked it open.

 

            “What’s that?”

 

            “Dried fruit,” Dr Williams said simply, taking three pieces of dried apricot out and waving them in the children’s direction. They were now sitting on the ground, huddled together and looking miserable, but they looked up with interest when they saw food. Dr Williams ostentatiously popped an apricot into her mouth, chewed and swallowed, and moved forward slowly, crouching down so she was on the kids’ level and holding out the apricot bits. The boy shrank back a little, but the girl leaned forward, wary eyes on Dr Williams, and took them both.

 

            “You’re feeding Neanderthals by hand,” Connor breathed, with a sort of reverent geekiness. “ _So cool_.”

 

            “Conn, they’re just a couple of kids,” Stephen said a little shortly. “And we don’t know they’re Neanderthals.”

 

            The girl popped one into her mouth, chewed, and swallowed. The boy watched her, and after a second took the second piece and nibbled at it. Then he smiled spontaneously and popped the whole thing in, and suddenly they were all beaming, Dr Williams, the girl, and the boy.

 

            “Aww,” Ditzy said, not quite sotto voce.

 

            Dr Williams took another few apricots from her packet, and added some nuts; she shared them out between herself and the kids, who received them eagerly.

 

            “Right,” Ryan said to Stringer. “If you’re okay winning hearts and minds with dried fruit here, we’re going back to the camp before Claire stages a mutiny.”

 

            “She’s asleep,” Stephen protested.

 

            “She’s still pissed off,” Ryan countered.

 

            “It’s the wrong sort of pissed off for mutinies,” Stephen said rather lamely, knowing what he meant, but not how to get it across.

 

            Ryan gave him a sceptical look.

 

            “We’re fine here,” Stringer said, grinning. “We’ll fetch you if we need some translation, don’t worry. Have you seen the dog?”

 

            “It might be their pet wolf, and no,” Stephen said apologetically. “This place is a dog-walker’s paradise, and it’s got lost in among the other tracks.”

 

            “OK, then,” Stringer said. “We’ll keep an eye out. Night night, sleep tight, don’t let the Neanderthals bite.”

 

            Stephen opened his mouth to say something, shut it again abruptly because it was a bit useless, and turned to go. Ryan flipped Stringer off with a lazy ease and went as well, and Kermit and Ditzy were already halfway back to the camp.

 

            Stephen stopped and looked back at the kids before he rejoined the path, seeing them small and vulnerable in a ring of armed men dressed in black, with only Dr Williams sitting down with them, treating them like humans instead of curiosities. They were both watching him, and they looked a bit nervous now. He smiled and waved before he turned again to go.

 

            He hoped it made them feel better; it didn’t work on him.

 

 

            Up at the campsite, the women were still in their nest of blankets and sleeping bags, Claire and Cara still asleep and Davy sitting up, wide awake and talking softly to Finn, who was crouched next to her. Stephen slid his hand into Ryan’s for just a moment and squeezed tightly, feeling his engagement ring press into the flesh of his finger. Ryan pulled them to a stop a little outside the ring of firelight and turned to him, bringing one hand up to tilt his head into a brief kiss. Stephen leant his forehead against his partner’s and smiled, small and quiet in the darkness.

 

            “They’ll look after the kids,” Ryan promised him after a moment, voice soft-edged and low. “You wait, you’ll be getting pictures of Connor teaching them to play with a Rubik’s Cube any minute now.”

 

            Stephen’s voice broke on a laugh. “Oh god, won’t Lester love that.” 

 

            “You’d be surprised. There’s a sense of humour in there somewhere. And he’s got kids of his own, remember.”

 

            “Someone reproduced with him? Why?”

 

            Ryan snorted. “Presumably he didn’t always have an icicle wrapped in a custom-made silk tie wedged up his arse.”

 

            Stephen sniggered, and tugged on Ryan’s hand, putting them back on course for the campsite again. They passed between Ditzy and Claire’s car and a tent, and came to a halt by the nest. Blade was leaning against the bonnet of Kermit and Cara’s car, flipping his knife end over end, and Ryan unclipped the sheath attached to his wrist and tossed it back to the younger man, knife and all. Stephen didn’t even bother wincing.

 

            Davy got to her feet and put a large, wicked-looking carving knife away, before picking up a sleeping bag and tossing it into the open mouth of her tent with a soft _whoomph_ of fabric hitting obstacles. The nest had got smaller since Stephen had last seen it, and was now down to just the items that Claire and Cara were actually on top of or wrapped in; probably Davy and Finn had reduced it.

 

            “See?” Stephen said to Ryan. “No mutinies.”

 

            Ryan gave him a lopsided grin in acknowledgement of the joke and bent down to investigate their own tent. Stephen had sacrificed a couple of pillows to the nest – he liked camping fine, but appreciated his creature comforts just as much – and these had been neatly replaced exactly where they had come from, according to Ryan, voice slightly muffled by the fact that he was bent almost double with his head inside the tent. Stephen hummed in agreement and admired the view.

 

            Ditzy and Kermit finished a brief conference on how best to disentangle their snoozing partners without either waking them or rolling them into the fire which was slowly burning down, and Ditzy knelt down by Claire’s sleeping form. She was wrapped in the biggest bloody sleeping bag Stephen had ever seen, and almost none of her was visible, except for a tuft of blonde curly hair.

 

            “Come on, Claire,” Ditzy murmured, “you’re making the place look untidy,” and Stephen averted his eyes from the obvious affection in Ditzy’s face, in his every gesture.

 

            Claire mumbled something inaudible, but undoubtedly malign. Ditzy chuckled and scooped her into his arms, lifted her with an unnecessary grunt of effort and carried her the few short steps to their tent. Kermit and Cara didn’t even speak; Kermit just touched her face gently and pulled her to her feet when her grey eyes flickered open, holding her steady as she wavered and collecting the blankets she’d been curled up on, before she yawned as unselfconsciously as a child, waved goodnight to Stephen and Ryan, and disappeared into their tent. Kermit gave them both a shy half-grin, looking absurdly young and baby-faced in the low firelight.

 

            “Night, boss. Night, Hart.”  


            “Night, Kermit,” Ryan answered, and Stephen smiled as easily as he knew how and ducked into his and Ryan’s tent. Blade and Lyle, not needing to reorganise their bedding, had already disappeared.

 

            Thin grey light was working its way into the pre-dawn sky, lighting the fabric of their tent above Stephen’s head as he stripped down to his boxer shorts and slid into his sleeping bag. Ryan stooped and ducked into the tent to join him, blotting out what little light there had been, and zipped up the tent flaps after himself.

 

            “Were we ever that young?” Ryan said.

 

            “What, like Kermit and Cara?” Stephen rubbed his hands over his weary eyes and set down his phone, a text sent to Connor and Stringer, just in case. _Please remember they’re only children, and if they’re not anatomically modern humans, they’re the next best thing. SH._ It might be a meaningless gesture, but then again, it might not; Connor had a heart composed entirely of marshmallow, and Stringer had a gentle streak and a functioning sense of proportion. Neither of them would hurt the kids unless they were forced to. “Probably. But I was a mess when I was their age, so then again...”

 

            Ryan’s wide mouth twisted sideways, and he stripped off himself before flipping open his sleeping bag so that it formed one continuous surface of fabric and pulling at Stephen’s sleeping bag so it did the same. He slid down to rest on his side, propping himself up on his elbow, and held out one strong arm. “Come here,” he said.

 

            Stephen smiled tiredly and shuffled sideways until Ryan could loop his outstretched arm around his waist and draw him closer, pull him against his chest and hold him. It was cool enough for this now, just before dawn, but if the heatwave continued they would probably wake too hot, particularly considering that Stephen’s skin always ran hot. Stephen didn’t care.

 

            “This is ridiculous,” Stephen said, closing his eyes, Ryan’s chest rising and falling with his steady breathing against the skin of his back.

 

            “What?”

 

            “Me being the little spoon when I’m taller than you.”

 

            Ryan muffled a laugh against the back of Stephen’s neck. It tickled; Stephen squirmed, and Ryan pinched his arse. “Sleep, Hart. You idiot.”

 

            Stephen smiled, and welcomed sleep with his arms wide open.


	9. Chapter 9

            The early-hours wake-up call was not referred to at breakfast the next day, which took place – due to the morning’s alarums and excursions – at about half-past ten. Not even the most masochistic of the men was keen to be up at eight, as had been planned originally, and most of the camp slept soundly through until ten, when the sunlight grew too bright to ignore and Ryan crawled out of his tent and made a determined move in the direction of a fried breakfast. The resulting curses and smell of burning woke Ditzy and brought Davy and Finn to light, resulting in even more smoke and cursing, but significantly more edible food to show for it. Like sunflowers turning to the sun, Blade and Lyle had responded to the scent of food and had made their appearance – Lyle wearing nothing more than a pair of Hawaiian-print shorts in an eye-searing orange, which he insisted that he had the skin-tone to pull off. Stephen had demanded breakfast in bed from the depths of his tent, a sally that was treated with all the respect it deserved and a great deal of mockery, while Cara had actually _got_ breakfast in bed, or at the very least sleeping bag. It was common knowledge both that Kermit was wound round Cara’s little finger and that Cara could pull off a set of puppy-dog eyes that would make a saint commit murder in her name, so this wasn’t considered humorous so much as par for the course.

 

            Poor Claire, who had now had two thoroughly inadequate nights’ sleep, had to be woken gently by Ditzy brandishing a mug of coffee at twenty-five past ten, when most of the men were about to leave for the aerial obstacle course. They had chosen the longest and most difficult route available, while Davy and Stephen had elected to walk Claire and Cara through a shorter, easier one. Cara was skittish about heights, although willing to try anything once, and Claire had said flatly that she was unfit, so anything more difficult was out of the question. She sat crossly by the foil barbecues that had been set up to make bacon butties – it wasn’t worth resurrecting the dirty grill from the previous night – and ate her breakfast with the air of one who wished to retire to a fainting couch, but was prepared to martyr herself in a good cause.

 

            “This hasn’t been good for you, has it?” Cara said ruefully, when Ditzy was long gone. The camp had been almost entirely packed up, except for the one remaining picnic blanket they were sitting on – well, Stephen had been banished from it for taking up too much space, and Claire was slumped half on top of Davy and not strictly upright, but it was still providing most of the people present with a seat. Thermoses of coffee and bacon butties wrapped up in the last of the foil had been left for those who had not yet had a chance to eat, like Claire, and three of the five cars had left the field. The place looked a little sad and empty.

 

            Claire grimaced. “Well, I’ve _enjoyed_ it. Except for…” She shrugged. “Well.” She took a very large bite out of her bacon butty. “Everything’s stressful, you know? One way or another.”

 

            “Mm,” Stephen said, thinking of the text from Connor he’d received not long after waking. _Had 2 send kids home w/out their dog. Said their mums wd b worried. No dog found. Stringer + friends stayin. Going home_. According to Stringer, who had also been in contact, Connor had simply fallen asleep in the back of one of the ARC jeeps after Dr Williams had convinced the two children to go home, and everyone had agreed that – if any of the scientists stayed with the anomaly, which was looking persistent but otherwise tedious – Connor would not be among them. In the end, only Dr Williams had stayed, and that was only because they were all slightly concerned that the children might tell their mothers and fathers where their dog had got to and what they’d been up to when they ought to have been collecting tubers, resulting in an incursion of concerned Palaeolithic parents. Drawing as a method of communication was effective in many ways, but it lacked nuance.

 

            Davy gave Stephen a knowing look that Stephen chose not to register. Exactly how much had she overheard last night?

 

            He dismissed the thought and ate another bacon butty.

 

            “Isn’t that your third?” Claire enquired, giving him a jaundiced look over the rim of her coffee mug.

 

            “’M a growing boy,” Stephen said through a mouthful of sandwich.

 

            “You’re a greedy bastard,” Davy complained. “That was _mine_.”

 

            “Sorry,” Stephen said, not very contritely.

 

            Davy waved his apologies aside. “Never mind. Claire, are you done?”

 

            Claire nodded and got to her feet, dusting off her hands on her jeans and surveying the dismantled campsite. “Yes. Cara? Stephen, put that bacon butty out of its misery, would you?”

 

            “I don’t have room for a fourth,” Stephen said. Davy filched it. “And you can’t eat while you’re driving!”

 

            “You’ll give her ideas,” Cara warned, trying to fold up a picnic blanket that was at least as tall as she was. “Does anyone know where this aerial obstacle course thing is?”

 

            “Yes,” Stephen said, sucking ketchup off his fingers and coming to the rescue before the picnic blanket could entirely envelope Cara.

 

            “Right, you’re leading,” Claire said. “I’ll follow.” She looked around with vague confusion for the others’ things; her own rucksack was at her feet. “Um –”

 

            “You’re coming with me,” Cara said, handing off the folded picnic blanket. “I’m driving. Obviously.”

 

            “Do I look that much like shit?”

 

            “Claire,” Cara said gently. “You look like you’ve been dragged through a hedge backwards and thrown under a combine harvester.”

 

            Claire let out a noise of despair, and Stephen glanced at Davy, who shrugged slightly and stared at the sky.

 

             Cara put a comb into Claire’s hands and started to push her up the slope to Cara’s car. “Come on and we can bitch about the boys in peace.”

 

            Stephen opened his mouth and closed it again.

 

            “Not you, Stephen,” all three women said at once, and Claire freed herself from Cara and started to try to put her hair into some sort of order. She regarded the other three with a fixed look in her bottle-green eyes, then her generous mouth twisted in a smirk.

 

            “You ever think maybe Blade has some sort of point, thinking we’d intimidate a newcomer?”

 

            “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Davy said, heading in the direction of Stephen’s car – which wasn’t going to help her, since, unless she’d picked his pocket in the last thirty seconds, she didn’t have the keys. “I was definitely not intimidated when I met you at Christmas. Not at all.”  


            Stephen grinned and followed her. She hadn’t picked his pocket: he pulled out his keys and unlocked the car and she hopped into the front passenger seat. Claire was already in the front passenger seat of Cara’s car, and could just about be seen swearing and yanking at a knot in her hair with the comb Cara had passed to her. Stephen entertained himself for a few moments by reading her lips, before pulling out of the field into the small country lane that had led them to it. Cara followed.

 

            “That’s some tangles,” Davy remarked, craning her neck to look at what was happening behind them. Stephen glanced into the mirror and saw Claire bad-temperedly slam the field’s gate shut and padlock it once more. The comb was sticking out of her hair.

 

            “That doesn’t look… comfortable?” Stephen offered, rather awkwardly.

 

            Davy tugged on the end of her own elaborate plait, courtesy of Claire from the previous night. It wasn’t as tidy as it had been before, mussed by time and exertion – Stephen refused to contemplate what Davy had been up to in the meantime – but the strands falling out at the front softened her face and made her look less like an avenging Amazon than she had done the first time Stephen had met her. “It isn’t,” she said, and glanced at Stephen’s short brown hair. “Not one of your problems?”

 

            Stephen allowed himself a small grin. “Lots of problems, but not that one.”   

 

            Davy smirked back at him, and settled back into the seat, tweaking her seatbelt absently. “Such as early morning wake-up calls?”

 

            Stephen said nothing.

 

            “Don’t worry,” Davy said almost irritably, “I’m not going to ask more questions, I mean, it’s fucking obvious you lot are up to something… weird.” She waved an awkward hand. “You know what I mean. Anyway, _I_ don’t want to know what it is, I just… Does that happen a lot?”

 

            “Yeah,” Stephen said cautiously. Fuck, how much _had_ Davy overheard? She had been far wider awake than Claire or Cara earlier that morning, and Stephen had known her long enough to realise that she was a highly inquisitive person – and unlike Claire or Cara, hadn’t blunted the edges of that with the deliberate incuriosity that helped the others draw a much-blurred but still extant line between their partners’ work and home lives. They just didn’t want to know, and they were a lot better at enforcing that for themselves than Davy apparently was. Stephen, of course, just knew too much about most of what Ryan was doing. He was almost sure he wouldn’t want to be without the information, but some days he wondered whether he’d prefer not to know about every near miss.

 

            Davy digested this. “Were we in danger? Like Claire said?”

 

            Stephen thought about the size of the Palaeolithic encampment, the number of adults, their weapons, how easily the children could have panicked and raised the alarm. And none of them, except Blade, had been properly armed in any meaningful sense of the word. There would have been blood spilt, he knew that much. “A bit,” he said.

 

            “Hm,” Davy said, chewing on her lower lip and folding her arms. She was staring out into the road with a laser intensity Stephen was very glad she wasn’t fixing on him. Then she shook her head abruptly. “None of my business.”

 

            “Well,” Stephen said, having a variety of doubts on this subject that he usually filed under ‘I wish this would happen, but it never will’, subsection: ‘anomaly project’, clause: ‘educating the public’. He accepted that Lester would never go for a public anomaly project, at least not at the moment, and he felt they handled the anomalies well enough that the good of public knowledge could be outweighed by the dreadful of public interference, but he wasn’t comfortable with the secrecy, either. Lester might go at any time, if a better job turned up; he wouldn’t waste his career on a backwater job like the ARC. And who was to say the next person would be as good at his or her job as Lester was? Or as principled? Lester was a wanker with ice for veins, but he came through for the ARC when he was needed most desperately. The fine balance the anomaly project rested on never failed to give Stephen a serious fit of the dreadful forebodings, so he tried to avoid thinking about it.

 

            “Hey,” Davy said. “Less deep introspection. More focussing on the road.”

 

            Jolted, Stephen turned to look at her and found her smiling at him, apparently having put aside whatever suspicions she’d had about the early morning’s events. He smiled back at her a bit helplessly, and then turned his eyes back on the road, just in time to groan and curse.

 

            “What?”

 

            “We missed a turning,” Stephen said, and thumped the steering wheel, annoyed at himself.

 

            “There are worse things to do,” Davy said, immediately followed by “Oh my god, your driving,” as Stephen wrenched the car round in a smooth and professional U-turn that nearly ran over a cat.

 

            “Fuck!”

 

            “Calm down,” Davy said, trying for soothing and proving to be rather bad at it. “Seriously. It’s fine. Just… breathe? You don’t want to climb like this.”

 

            “No,” Stephen said, getting a grip. He smiled weakly at Davy and glanced into the mirror at Cara’s car, fearing that he’d lost the others with the abrupt U-turn. Claire had her head in her hands and Cara looked appalled, but was nonetheless right behind him. Clearly Kermit wasn’t the only one in the Cooper family with lethally good driving skills. “No. Definitely not.” He made a conscious attempt at relaxing.

 

            There was a stilted pause. Davy glanced at him and back and shifted jerkily in her seat, and Stephen drove with mechanical, by-the-book correctness, eyes flicking from mirror to road.

 

            “So,” Davy said, drawing the word out to the point where Stephen felt the vowel ought to be allowed to die a decent death, “you really have _no_ idea who Lyle and Blade are dating?”

 

            Stephen made a split-second decision to the effect that this was miles better than her interrogating him about his wedding with Ryan, which would probably be ten minutes in a registry office with just the two of them and a couple of witnesses if the pressure to have fancy plans kept up and the job got any more time-consuming, and threw Blade and Lyle under the metaphorical bus. “Blade no, Lyle yes.”

 

            “Wait, what?”

 

            “I don’t know who Lyle’s dating. Ryan’s got some kind of a clue but I don’t. I know Blade’s girlfriend. But they’re both shy, and she’s… look, until a few weeks ago, if I’d said she had any life outside office protocol it would just have been… being polite.”

 

            “How is Blade shy?” Davy demanded, swiftly followed by: “He doesn’t want to talk about her, obviously, but I don’t count that as shy, he isn’t normally. And she sounds really dull.”

 

            “I’m going off what Ryan says here,” Stephen defended himself. “Maybe guarded would be a better word. And she isn’t dull, and she’s probably the most useful person at work, she pulls off minor miracles every day, she’s just… God, talking to her outside work, I wouldn’t know where to start.”

 

            “Dull and terrifying,” Davy summarised inaccurately, clearly forming a really regrettable impression of Lorraine Wickes.

           

            “Well, he likes her,” Stephen said, finding himself in the peculiar position of defending a relationship he knew very little about. “I mean, so far as I can tell. So far as anyone can tell. Why don’t you ask Ryan?”

 

            “Because he wouldn’t tell me anything,” Davy said, right on the money for once. Stephen swung the car round a sharp bend into a car park, past a large cheerful sign inscribed with the words Woodland Adventure Park, and moulded to look as if it was made from planks of knotted, barely smoothed wood whilst actually being plastic. “Is this it?”

 

            “Well, the place is called Woodland Adventure Park, and that sign said Woodland Adventure Park, so.” Stephen parked the car neatly in an empty space, woodchips being flattened and scattered under the wheels of the car, and Cara brought her car in next to them. They could see the boys’ cars already parked, in a neat line up towards the entrance. There were quite a few other cars, not surprising considering that it was a pleasant June Sunday, and Stephen was suddenly glad they’d booked ahead.

 

            “I thought it was further away,” Davy said, jumping out of the car and inspecting the low building where equipment was doled out and the tall dull-barked trees around them, sunlight filtering through green leaves.

 

            “It’s round the corner,” Stephen said. “The problem is the corners. It can’t be more than maybe fifteen minutes’ walk from the campsite in a straight line.” He looked around. “It might even be the rest of the wood that’s by the campsite. Claire has the tickets, right?”

 

            “Claire does have the tickets,” Claire said in tones of resignation, producing the bits of paper she had printed off after booking online and distributing them. “Everybody take a ticket.”

 

            They handed over their tickets at the welcome centre, and were kitted out with harnesses and helmets before being talked through the trail they were planning to follow, taken out and shown the starting point and how to clip themselves on to the various lines. Stephen was pleased to see that Claire and Cara listened carefully to the instructions, and didn’t make any silly beginner’s mistakes or look noticeably terrified in a way that would have him concerned for his and Davy’s ability to keep them on the trees and out of hospital. The staff member who kitted them out made one and only one sexist joke, having grasped that Stephen was one man attached to a group of three women and assumed that he would therefore be in charge, and was promptly taken off at the knees by Claire before Davy could even react. The lack of sleep had evidently had a deleterious effect on Claire’s ability to tolerate bullshit. Either way, the staff member kept it simple, joke-free and inoffensive from then on, and mostly remembered to address the whole group instead of just Stephen. Davy asked a few less than strictly necessary technical questions in order to prove that she was the most experienced climber in the group, Stephen stared innocuously at the sky instead of rescuing the staff member from the interrogation – particularly when he turned out not to know the answers to half of Davy’s questions – and all in all, by the time the guy left, he looked as if he’d been run over by a steam-roller.

 

            “I feel _much_ better,” Claire said brightly, having had a certain amount of zip and zing restored to her by the confrontation.

 

            “So next time you have an early morning, we should find you a large cup of coffee and somebody to sharpen your claws on,” Davy said, grinning conspiratorially at her. “Noted.”

 

            Cara had gone from stifling a smile to staring up at the trees with a slight twist to her lips and eyes clouded with anxiety. Stephen nudged her. “Hey. Okay?”

 

            “I think so,” Cara said slowly, and then glanced at him, frowning. “You won’t let me fall, right?”

 

            “No,” Stephen said, and found a smile for her. “You know you don’t have to do this, right?”

 

            “I’m not backing out.”

 

            “Not an answer,” Stephen pointed out, feeling very daring. The surprised look on Cara’s face indicated that she hadn’t expected him to push her on that one, either.

 

            “Yes, I know, I know.” She fiddled with one of the carabiners.

 

            “You won’t fall,” Stephen said, giving her a slight, comradely shake, the way he might have shaken Connor’s shoulder in a similar situation. “It’ll be fine.”

 

            Cara sighed and blew a strand of hair out of her face. Unlike Davy, she hadn’t kept her fancy plait; most of hers was back in a rough, low knot at the back of her neck, just under the edge of the helmet, which looked comically oversized on her delicate skull. “Okay.”

 

            “I’ll go first,” Davy said, clipping herself on and setting one foot on the ascending rope bridge that was the first challenge. “Then you two, and Stephen, will you –”

 

            “Mop up?” Claire suggested, inspecting the wires and ropes and strategically-placed planks of the various courses that could be seen from their starting point.

 

            “Fine,” Stephen said, before Davy could roll her eyes and correct Claire. He caught Davy’s eye and nodded, and Davy started to climb, clearly slowing herself to account for her companions’ inexperience. Claire exhaled, blowing her fringe up off her face – well, the half-inch of fringe that wasn’t confined in a red plastic helmet – and treating the obstacle to a fixed, calculating stare before climbing onto it, and Cara bounced determinedly up onto it as if she’d never had any doubts at all. Stephen joined her, and slowly, they started to make their way through the course.


	10. Chapter 10

            It was a nice course and a nice day. It wasn’t exactly challenging for Stephen or Davy, but helping Claire and Cara through it added a certain edge, and Stephen thought the course well-planned and fun, even if it wasn’t a stretch. It helped being tall, though; they had to cheat at some points, since whoever had designed the course hadn’t had Cara-sized people in mind. Stephen gave her a piggy-back, to the amusement of everyone else in the vicinity, including an athletic family a couple of metres above and to the left of them on a different course. Claire took a picture that would probably end up on Facebook, and Cara giggled a good deal less nervously than Stephen had expected. She had a hell of a grip, though, and her knuckles were white and red where she had her arms clasped around his neck, one hand gripping her opposite wrist.

 

            About half an hour into the course, a third of the way through its length, Stephen disentangled himself from the cushioning net at the end of a zipwire, boosted himself onto a platform of wooden planks, removed a splinter, and found the women sitting cross-legged on the platform conferring over a map. Claire had pocketed one of the guides to the adventure park, which gave an indication of where the various obstacle courses, aerial and terrestrial, crossed, and had worked out where their path and the boys’ might cross. This was apparently one of the spots.

 

            Stephen sneaked his phone out of the zipped pocket of his trousers and took a photo of Claire pulling a face at the map while Davy looked sceptically at her and Cara looked suspiciously into the trees above, strung with wire and ladders. Two could play at the Facebook game.

 

             “But seriously,” Claire was saying, “they ought to be here. We got here when we expected to, we’re moving as fast as we expected to, they –”

 

            There was a whoop and a yell of “ _Cowabunga_!” in a very familiar voice, and Finn shot past, several metres above their heads and attached to a zipline none of them had spotted. There was then a loud crash, as of somebody hitting a tree-trunk at speed, and Stephen flinched; Davy had shot to her feet, and both Cara and Claire had cringed.

 

            “Ow,” Finn said, scarcely quieter than his collision with the tree. “Bollocks!”

 

            “If that boy had a brain, he’d be dangerous,” Claire observed, eyebrows so high on her forehead they were in danger of combining with her hairline as she folded up the map and put it away.

 

            “Are you okay, Robbie?” Davy called.

 

            “I think we found the boys,” Cara sighed.

 

            “For fuck’s sake, Rob, you fucking moron,” Ditzy bellowed in exasperation, flying past mere moments later. There was another, similar crash. “Bugger!”

 

            “I think we might have done,” Stephen said.

 

            “Try not to hit the tree face first!” Ditzy shouted back to the rest of his group. Neither he, nor Finn, nor anyone else appeared to have noticed their partners, equal parts fascinated and appalled, observing from a platform several metres below them.

 

            Blade went whizzing past in eerie silence, managed a quieter collision with the tree than anyone else, and confined himself to a smug “Not that hard,” rapidly punctured by a _forte fortissimo_ “Sod off, Finn, you wanker.”

 

            “Well, that’ll teach you to boast, won’t it,” Ryan remarked, flying past in remarkably stolid style.

 

            The grumbling was audible from their platform. Davy choked on a laugh, and Cara caught her eye; they both got the giggles. Stephen sniggered along with them.

 

            “It’s like watching some kind of nature programme,” Claire observed, in tones designed to be heard from one end of a cavernous assembly hall to the other. She took on the inflection and accents of David Attenborough, and continued. “Here we see the alpha males in their natural habitat. Destroying every innocent tree in their path and sullying the ears of every family out for a pleasant, PG-rated weekend adventure, their anti-social tendencies are in fact a perfectly pitched adaptation –”

 

            “Hi, Claire,” Ditzy yelled. “Love you too, babe.”

 

            Stephen leaned forward and realised that the platform the other men had landed on was, in fact, visible from their platform, provided you didn’t have a tree-trunk in the way. Ryan waved at him, and he waved back.

 

            “I’m actually fine,” Finn called. “Promise.”

 

            “You’re bleeding everywhere,” Davy pointed out, curiously blasé for someone whose boyfriend was, in fact, bleeding everywhere, but then if you were Finn’s girlfriend you probably had to get used to it.

 

            “It’s just my _nose_. It’s not even broken!”

 

            “What did you do with the tissue I gave you?” Ditzy demanded, rounding on Finn.

 

            “Er…”

 

            “Gangway!” Lyle howled, and Stephen ducked instinctively as Lyle flew through the air on the zipwire, scattering his colleagues on the platform and colliding thunderously with the padded tree-trunk that had given the others so much trouble. Lyle, of course, bounced off as easily as a rubber ball, and landed to face the recriminations of his colleagues, who evidently felt they could have used a bit more warning. Ditzy had Finn firmly by one arm and, by the looks of things, was trying to suffocate him with a tissue. Stephen sympathised.

 

            “I think we should move on,” Claire said. “It’s not as if they’ll notice.”

 

            “Wait, I want to see Darren go through,” Cara said.

 

            A bloodcurdling screech sounded from the other end of the boys’ zipwire. Stephen would have supposed this to be Kermit’s idea of a battle-cry if he hadn’t actually witnessed Kermit’s idea of a battle-cry.

 

            “Never mind, let’s go,” Cara said.

 

            A vaguely Kermit-shaped blur made a respectable attempt to break the sound barrier and rebounded off the tree-trunk to the accompaniment of even more swearing than Lyle’s advent had caused. Davy, Claire, and Cara were already mostly gone. Stephen grinned, shook his head, and hoped that not too many children had learnt new words as a result of the day’s festivities.

 

            They kept going until they were well out of earshot of the boys’ antics, several trees and plenty of clear air between the two groups. Their obstacle course had now gone in a completely different direction to the others’, and currently featured a trio of heavy wires, stretched parallel to each other across the yawning gap between two wooden platforms. It was at least three metres off the ground, and Claire had only accomplished it with a great deal of hissed cursing between folded lips. She and Davy had now, after some shouted negotiation between the two platforms, moved on to another challenge, which involved stepping from dangling, swinging log to dangling, swinging log on a long bridge. They had got quite a long way, and were mostly laughing and mocking each other.

 

            Cara and Stephen, meanwhile, were having a philosophical discussion about the tensile strength of heavy-gauge wire.

 

            “I just don’t… I mean, is it going to hold me?” Cara said, uncertainly.

 

            “Cara,” Stephen said, “it held Davy and Claire _at the same time_. Claire must have a good, what, ten kilos on you?”

 

            “I’m not answering that.” Cara kicked her heels against the empty air beneath the platform and looked down at the leafy floor, a tight, unhappy twist to her mouth and a pale cast to her skin; summer had touched her, but only lightly, a biscuit-coloured tan on face and hands and faint freckles on the bridge of her nose and sweep of her cheekbones. “It just doesn’t look like it’ll take anyone’s weight. It looks like string.”

 

            “It’s definitely not string,” Stephen said, briefly entertaining the notion of going and bouncing up and down on it just to prove his point, but firstly he’d feel silly and secondly Cara probably wouldn’t feel any better. “Look, it’s only a few steps.”

 

            “I know,” Cara said unhappily. “I know. I’m working myself up to it, okay? I’m not _used_ to being scared of things.”

 

            “Mothers are usually pretty fearless?” Stephen offered, drawing a total blank. “In general.” He started mentally totting up examples: lionesses braving buffalo, birds that acted as decoys to lure predators away, honey badgers’ response to losing their cubs, that one woman who had charged a gallimimus armed with nothing more than a frying pan and an eldritch shriek to rescue her terrified teenager the other week… Well, maybe he couldn’t tell Cara about that one.

 

            Cara gave him a bleak look out of narrow grey eyes. “I had a personality before I got knocked up.”

 

            “Er,” Stephen said, confounded.

 

            Cara kicked the air particularly viciously. “Frightening things happen all the time. You deal with it.”

 

            “Yes?” Stephen said cautiously, with her thus far, and ran a hand through his dark hair.

 

            “I mean… I’ve been my mum’s carer as long as I can remember and I always will be, I had a surprise kid, my mother had a transplant that could so easily have killed her and she’ll always be in and out of hospital as long as she lives, which probably won’t be long enough to see Beth grow up, Darren goes and gets himself nearly killed just about every day he’s on the job –”

 

            “Not every day,” Stephen said hastily, feeling he ought to stand up for Kermit’s ability to take care of himself, if only because it might ease Cara’s anxiety a little.

 

            “- shut up, Stephen – and the worst thing is, he’s a thrill-seeker, so even if he survives to leave the army he’ll _always_ be like this. If it’s not his motorbike or getting shot at, it’ll be something else.” She huffed into a small, unhappy pause. “I’m scared of things all the time, things I can’t get away from and things I can. There are scary things I like to do because they’re fun while I’m doing them, and I just make myself do them. I make myself do the things that scare me because they have to be done, or because they’re worth it, or both. I don’t even have to think about it, I just do it. But those things don’t scare me like this. I feel like my knees are jelly.”

 

            Stephen said nothing, paralysed into muteness. Cara pulled her legs up onto the platform and wrapped her arms around her knees, staring fixedly down into the leaf litter. After a bit, she unfolded to sit with crossed legs, and then her back straightened and she turned to him as if she’d made a decision.

 

            “Which one do I clip the safety carabiner to again?” she asked, almost normally.

 

            Stephen felt flooded with relief. He had no idea what he would have done if she’d asked him to help her find a way to get down from the platform that didn’t involve the parallel wires. “The middle one,” he said. “Hang on to the top one, put your feet on the bottom. Here.” He got to his feet alongside her and went to clip her onto the obstacle, but found that she was standing there with her arms spread wide. “What?”

 

            “I want a hug,” Cara said.

 

            “Oh?” Stephen said uncertainly, and put his arms around her rather awkwardly. She wrapped hers very tightly around him and pressed her small, helmeted head against his chest fiercely.

 

            “Thank you,” she said, rather muffled.

 

            “Um,” Stephen said, instead of ‘what for’. Claire and Cara hugged each other a lot,  Lizzie, of course, spread hugs around like confetti, and Davy had taken to joining in lately, but he usually wasn’t much on physical contact with people who weren’t Ryan unless there was a clearly defined practical reason for it

 

            “You’re the most awkward turtle I’ve ever met,” she continued, “but thank you.”

 

            “Okay?” Stephen said, puzzled.

 

            She flicked his nose with a finger when he let go. “Never mind. Keep talking to me, okay?”

 

            “Of course,” Stephen said, and clipped her onto the lines. “Okay, ready?”

 

            “No,” Cara said, but slid her feet onto the wire anyway.

 

            “One foot in front of the other,” Stephen told her, falling back into his soothing-undergraduates-driven-to-distraction-by-Nick’s-erratic-teaching voice. “Just put one foot in front of the other, and keep your hands moving along with it…”

 

            By the time Cara was halfway across, she was moving with relative confidence, and Stephen was running out of soothing babble. “…okay, that’s it, just keep going, you’re doing really well,” he was saying for the umpteenth time, when a small wolf popped out of the bushes down below with a rustle and gave Stephen a yellow-eyed inquisitive stare, pink tongue lolling out of its mouth as if it were laughing at Stephen.

 

            “Um, yeah, just remember, one foot in front of the other,” Stephen said, staring at the wolf and fumbling for his phone, trying to think what to do. Cara’s focus on her wire was absolute, and Stephen was pretty sure she hadn’t heard the wolf’s rustling. It hadn’t made any other noises, and anyway, he could pass it off as a dog –

 

            There was a larger rustle, attached to some familiar hissing and cursing, and an ARC soldier dressed in black and fully kitted-out, assault rifle and all, popped out of the bushes alongside the wolf. Stephen stared down at him, horrified, and identified him as Fiver. Fiver glanced up and spotted Stephen, and his jaw dropped.

 

            “What was that?” Cara demanded. Evidently a soldier-sized rustle was audible even through her intense focus.

 

            Stephen hastily tore his eyes away from the tableau of disaster on the forest floor and fixed them on Cara, who had come to a halt but was still looking fixedly straight ahead of herself. Fiver froze, and the wolf sat down on its haunches and started to lick its balls, because it had no sense of occasion or drama. “Just a dog,” he said, and was proud to find that there was no wobble in his voice.

 

            “I thought I heard someone?” Cara’s own voice was wavering a bit, as if she was trying to make conversation, to fill the gap between her feet and the ground with words.

 

            “Uh, yeah, some kid chasing the dog.” Stephen glared down at Fiver, who looked momentarily indignant, and then appalled as Adey appeared from behind a large tree-trunk. “There’s a couple of them, they’re just going now, dog’s run off. Keep your eyes on the middle distance, Cara, keep moving.”

 

            “Okay,” Cara said, and stared to slide forwards again. Stephen split his mental energies between narrating her movements and glowering at Fiver and Adey, who were now trying to sneak up on the wolf, because it was still engaging in acts of personal cleanliness and seemed totally unaware of them. There was a certain cartoonish charm about it, but Cara was nearly across, and she would certainly look down as soon as she reached the other side. And no matter how incurious she was prepared to be about the pre-dawn upheavals, a wolf being chased by two fully-armed soldiers she probably vaguely knew wasn’t going to be something he could smooth over.

 

            The wolf, having attained a satisfactory level of hygiene, straightened, looked round, saw Fiver and Adey poised to pounce on it, and put on an impressive turn of speed, shooting away into the undergrowth. Fiver and Adey charged after it like a pair of stealthy rhinoceroses, and Stephen winced and consoled himself with the thought that at least now Cara couldn’t see them.

 

            “Just a few more steps, Cara!” he called, and then Cara was on the other side and all but hyperventilating with relief. Stephen surprised himself by cheering.

 

 

            The rest of the course was comparatively easy: it contained no tame wolves and soldiers engaged in Tom-and-Jerry antics, and it did not require Stephen to coach Cara over long stretches of empty air. He and Cara caught up with Davy and Claire at the end of another zipwire, having an argument about whether they should wait, go on, or try to go back somehow which their arrival put an end to. After that, there was only an arrangement of ladders that made Claire use some idiomatic French expressions she hopefully hadn’t taught her students, a simple rope bridge, and a second zipwire to end in fine style. The lads were grouped at the end, waiting with a reasonable approximation of patience. Finn, who still had dried blood on his top and encrusted on bits of his face, mocked Davy for being slow and got crushed, Ditzy was wise enough to refrain but Lyle wasn’t and got a clip round the ear from Claire, and Kermit lifted Cara off the final platform instead of obliging her to use the steps and cuddled her, neither of them saying a word. Everyone politely paid no attention and found something else to talk about; it was pretty obvious that even the least challenging obstacle course had been a major test of Cara’s comfort zone, however much she’d enjoyed most of it. Stephen skirted the knot made up of Claire and Lyle arguing and Ditzy refereeing, and edged past the spectacle of Davy talking knowledgeably and at length about climbing while Finn listened with a besotted look on his face and Blade with a listening frown. Eventually, he pitched up in front of Ryan, who was leaning against a tree-trunk with an expression of quiet content. Stephen felt himself mirror it.

 

            “Hey,” he said, and leant his forehead against Ryan’s briefly. Ryan’s hands settled on his hips and squeezed gently. “Having fun?”

 

            “It’s like herding chimpanzees,” Ryan said, eyes falling briefly shut as his nose bumped against Stephen’s. “Lyle and Ditzy have been exchanging wit and repartee the whole way, Blade keeps pulling his phone out to text his girlfriend or even just look at his phone and _think_ about texting his girlfriend at awkward moments, Finn’s forever talking about going climbing with Davy to the point where Lyle’s going to turn it into some sort of euphemism, and Kermit kept worrying about Cara. I only had to apologise to about six people. We had a great time and I’ve got no fucking clue why they let us out of the madhouse, we’re a danger to humanity. Was Cara all right?”

 

            “Fine, yeah. Had to coach her through one bit.” Stephen extricated himself gently from Ryan’s grip and moved to lean against the bit of tree next to Ryan’s. Happily, it was a large and solid tree, so there was room enough for both of them. “Heard from Stringer?”

 

            Ryan’s blue eyes sharpened. “No. Why?”

 

            “We found the dog,” Stephen said dryly, keeping his voice low. “It ran out of the bushes while I was coaching Cara and Fiver and Adey ran after it. I don’t think she saw anything and Davy and Claire had moved on.”

 

            “Shit,” Ryan sighed and reached for his phone, but Stephen felt his buzz in his pocket and reached for it.

 

            “It’s Stringer,” he said after reading it at a glance, and showed the screen to Ryan.

 

            _Got the dog_ , the text read. _Nice save with Cara._

 

            _Tell Fiver and Adey their new names are Tom and Jerry_ , Stephen texted back. Ryan, reading over his shoulder, grinned.

 

            _Fiver has broken wrist_ , Stringer replied. _Tripped over dog while catching. Matt says his new name is Stupid Bugger. Abby tranked it in the end._

 

            Ryan borrowed Stephen’s phone. _So does that make Abby Elmer Fudd? TR._

 

            _What’s up, doc?_ Stringer texted back, and both Stephen and Ryan snorted with laughter.

 

           

            At the train station, they all went their separate ways. Davy had to catch a train to Bath, and Lyle got on a train to Swindon, for reasons he refused to divulge to anyone and avoided being questioned about by ducking into the station café and somehow disappearing. Ditzy and Kermit needed to go back to London, so they sorted their things out in the car park and swapped to cars that were actually going to London while Claire and Cara said goodbye to Davy, before discreetly making themselves scarce – Finn was hovering in the background. Claire waved to Davy one more time, and then Davy turned and walked away, catching Finn’s hand in hers, and headed for the platform her train was going to depart from.  Cara had already gone, heading for Kermit, who was standing by Blade and Finn’s empty car; Finn, of course, was now with Davy, and Blade seemed to have made himself scarce. Claire saw Cara reach Kermit and politely looked away, which had the bonus of bringing her face to face with Ditzy. Ryan and Stephen were talking intensely about something Claire couldn’t catch in the car, so they weren’t paying any attention.

 

            “Hey,” Ditzy said, smiling down at her with an edge of sadness to it.

 

            “Hey yourself.” Claire put her arms around his neck and kissed him. “You know, you don’t always have terrible ideas.” She felt Ditzy’s arms come round her and his head bend to hers, warm and comfortable and familiar. His fingers curled against the soft flesh under her ribs, and it tickled; she twitched and he tickled her on purpose, making her squeak. He muffled his laughter in the side of her neck and kissed her again.

 

            “I love you,” Ditzy said into the five millimetres of air between them.

 

            “I love you too.” She closed her eyes and rested her head against his shoulder, and he shifted his arms to hold her closer against his chest. “Ryan and Stephen will get bored of waiting for you.”

 

            “Mm.” Ditzy had his lips pressed against her forehead, which somewhat muffled the sound. “Darren has Cara pressed back against the car. They might violate a few public indecency laws if you don’t stop them.”

 

            “They’re adults,” Claire said, suddenly unwilling to let go of him. “They can cope. Blade and Finn will come back and break up the party soon, anyway.”

 

            “Mm,” Ditzy repeated.

 

            Claire took a couple of deep breaths, and then let him go. “See you soon.”

 

            Ditzy smiled down at her, and tucked one of her blonde curls behind her ear, out of her long-boned face. She smiled back up at him. Ditzy kissed her on the forehead, hummingbird-fast, and then slid rapidly into the back of Stephen and Ryan’s car and slammed the door behind him, making Stephen and Ryan start and look up. Stephen’s eyes flashed from Ditzy to Claire, and Claire smiled again. Wobblier, this time.

 

            The slant of Stephen’s mouth said he knew how she felt. She doubted it. He got to work with Ryan all the time, and – Claire suspected – share his dangers. Claire was suddenly viciously jealous, and she turned away and got into her own car. Cara and Kermit had stopped kissing, and were now standing talking to each other, so close they were one single silhouette in the afternoon sunshine, thrown across the tarmac of the car park. Each of them was holding both of the other’s hands, loose and relaxed by their sides.

 

            Claire didn’t feel like interrupting. She got into her car and pulled out of the car park in a fashion calculated to distress any pedestrians and other drivers, and made her way half-blindly onto the familiar route home. It had been a good weekend, not the most batshit of her boyfriend’s ideas at all, and she didn’t mean to spoil it by getting upset. There was a large glass of red wine and several episodes of _The Vicar of Dibley_ at home, with her name on them. And since she had a few marking-free hours of her weekend left to herself, she might make a large chocolate cake, and sod the healthy-eating habits.

 

            She’d earned it, after all.

 

 

            Blade came out of the gents, glanced casually across to the platform where Davy’s train was leaving from, and saw Davy pull Finn down into a kiss. He flicked a look at the arrivals board, noted that it would be another five minutes before Davy’s train arrived, and stepped into the station shop to take an unconscionably long time buying a few bars of chocolate and a newspaper. Having paid for these, he realised that he still had a whole three minutes left to kill, and pulled out his phone to text Lorraine.

 

            _About to leave Hereford now. Are u still up for drinks tomorrow?_

 

            _Absolutely_ , Lorraine texted back gratifyingly quickly. _Thank you for your texts, they’ve been a lifesaver this weekend. I’ve only just got home. Lester was unbelievably grumpy and he left to go on holiday three hours before I did. But he gave me a couple of days off, so that’s something to look forward to!_

 

            Blade smiled, inadvertently causing the teenaged boy behind the counter to acquire a new unattainable crush, and slipped his phone back into his pocket before going to find Finn and Davy. He’d timed it well; as he jogged down the steps towards the platform Davy reluctantly disengaged from Finn and stepped onto her train. Blade walked up the platform to join Finn and stood with him while the train pulled out and Finn waved enthusiastically. Blade wasn’t sure if Finn knew whether Davy could actually see him or not; he thought Finn was just waving on general principle. Fair enough.

 

            “Time to go?” he said quietly, when the train was gone.

 

            Finn smiled at him. “Yeah. Thanks for waiting. That was nice of you.”

 

            Blade blinked at him.

 

            “I saw you hide in the shop. You’ve got a heart, Blade. We all noticed.”

 

            Blade punched Finn in the arm and ducked his head to hide his expression.

 

 

            Not long afterwards, a British racing green Mercedes pulled up by Swindon station. A tall dark figure separated itself from the station entrance and came over, pulling open the passenger door and sliding inside as smoothly as the driver accelerated away from the station and turned for the main road.

 

            “Hi, James,” Lyle said, with a creditable attempt at his usual self-confident ease. “How was your weekend?”

 


End file.
